Where Does It Hurt?

One of the easiest ways to satisfy your existing clients and to get new clients is to find out where it hurts. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Then why don’t we do it?

As a business development executive for a small software startup in the 90s, I met a lot of customers. I attended over 50 user group meetings and trade shows a year. I gave dozens of presentations to potential customers such as Johnson & Johnson, Thompson Publishing, Varian Associates, and NASA. I was excited about the incredibly powerful and engaging software we provided to help these organizations manage their databases.

After a few months of keeping notes, I recall the shock of realization that hit me on a flight home from one of these meetings. What were people clamoring for?

A simple way to generate database reports, on the fly.

That’s it. They wanted to be able to generate an easy-to-read report of various database statistics. Now, these statistics are readily available from any database management system. The problem is, they are displayed as textual output from SQL statements.

In short, they’re ugly.

Problems Are Often Deceptively Simple to Solve

Back in the office, the CEO and I spent a total of about 10 hours putting together the reports. I designed the first HTML pages that would display the reports and he wrote the SQL statements and HTML wrappers required to extract the data and publish them to the pages. The reports were cross-linked, colorful, and very easy to read.

That one feature turned out to be a serious differentiator for us. On the basis of that feature alone, we sold thousands of licenses of that software. Who knew?

Say Ahhhh

Forget about showing off your fancy degree. Get the customer’s business on the table and start probing. Where’s the pain? You may be surprised at how simple the answer is, and how easily you can make them happy. Don’t spend so much time showing off your cool designs, or talking about how well-educated you are. They don’t really care about all that. The old adage, What’s in it for me? is nowhere more apparent than in business development. What are you going to do to solve their problems?

• If they need more business, how are your copywriting skills going to help them?
• If they have a customer service problem, how can your web design skills help them?
• If customers bail out before hitting their order page, how are you going to fix that?

Solve a problem like that and you’ll gain a long-term customer. Talk about how great you are and you’ll continue to struggle for new business.

I’ve talked about this problem-solving mentality in an earlier post called 5 Selling Truths You Must Learn. You might want to review that post for more inspiration.