“They don’t know what they don’t know…!”
Analysts observe that buyers have often completed 67% of their buying journey before engaging with live sellers. This has resulted in an assumption (by both buyers and vendors) that buyers know all about vendor offerings before any buyer-seller conversations take place.
This is incorrect!
Buyers know a lot, but they don’t know what they don’t know. Frequently they don’t know about some of your most important capabilities.
Buyers gather information from websites and, to a lesser degree, from their peers. Website information and associated demos tend to be feature/advantage oriented and rarely share specifics. After all, vendors don’t want their competition to have deep insight into their offerings!
Further, buyers’ vision of solution possibilities is partly bounded by their past and current experiences. They tend to think in terms of what is hard to do using their current systems and have a limited view of what might be missing. It is much harder to visualize something entirely new than a fix to one’s existing problem.
Vendors, on the other hand, typically have a much richer picture of the possibilities and options available. And vendor product teams are constantly releasing new functionality that may represent dramatic breakthroughs or capabilities enabling solutions that are entirely new.
Additionally, most vendors have seen many implementations of their offerings, perhaps spanning dozens or hundreds of customers, and have the advantage of the experience represented in these use cases.
Buyers, conversely, are generally constrained to their first-hand experiences: an “N” of one.
For example, a buyer’s current system lacks alerting functionality and the buyer thinks, “I need some way to alert our team when __ takes place.” What the buyer doesn’t know is that several vendors offer predictive alerting, based on trends and/or AI, that can generate alerts well before a threshold is reached, enabling buyers to act before it becomes a problem. These buyers never encountered this capability before and nor saw it in their online exploration.
Buyers don’t know what they don’t know…!
This means that Vision Generation Demos and discovery conversations are often the first (and sometimes the only) opportunities to expand or reengineer buyers’ vision of what’s possible. Accordingly, our job in these early conversations is to understand both what the buyer already knows about our offerings and what they don’t know.
We need to be prepared to use Biased Questions to (gently, but firmly!) introduce capabilities that buyers are unaware of, to build vision that may go far beyond the 67% starting point!
See the sections on Vision Reengineering and Biased Questions in Doing Discovery for details on how to apply these important and highly effective practices (pages 217 and 183, respectively, in “Elements of Discovery”).
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