How to Choose a Growth Lever

Description:

What can we do to find orientation among the many growth levers available to us? Between the hype around SEO, social selling, cold calling, drip mailing and more…it is easy to get lost. What lever do we apply, when and why? These are the main questions we are tackling in this video. We encourage you to look more closely at the “why” and “when” of each market lever. It’s tempting, but can also be counter-productive to look for scalable solutions before you’ve reached problem-solution fit with your customer! Before problem solution fit you first need customer proximity; you need to focus on fully understanding your customer and who you are talking to.

Exercises for this lesson:

This exercise is intended for individual or team sales agents as a way to practice and reinforce learnings. Incorporate this practice into your day and, if possible, into your ongoing sales work. This shouldn’t take you more than 15-20 minutes a day. Keep it simple. Good luck and have fun!

Introduction: In the early stages of the B2B sales game you are still looking for your problem-solution fit. You may think that you have it but in reality your theories need to get tested, transformed and verified in the real market with real customers. The best way to get this is to talk with your customers ;-) You want to unearth their stories about who they are and how your product impacts their lives.

Exercise: “Your Customer’s Story”

Step 1: Write down the 6 questions listed here (minute 6:44 in the video) as the questions which you can ask yourself in order to learn whether or not you have a problem-solution fit.

Step 2: Take the first question into consideration: “Who is my customer?”. This question can also be expanded to: Who is the problem owner? Who is the promoter? Who is the gatekeeper? Go back in your memory to see what you have learned from your sales interactions/calls during the past week or 2 weeks. Find at least one instance when a customer interaction provided an answer to this question.

Step 3: Repeat this same process from Step 2 with the next question: “My customer has needs —> which need(s) can I meet/fulfil?” and then with the remaining questions also. Keep unearthing more answers to these questions based on the different customer interactions that you have experienced. You are building your customer’s story.

Step 4: Take a critical look at your answers. Where do you see holes in your story about your customer?

Step 5: If you feel that there are no “holes” in your story - challenge yourself and your answers by sharing your findings with a person from your environment who has no immediate financial/emotional interest in your success or failure and is willing to provide you with honest feedback.

Step 6: Have you identified the holes in your story? Great - now you know more precisely how to target your learning in your future customer interactions :-)

Goal for this week:
Tuesday: Work through the “Your customer’s story” exercise at the start of the week
Friday: Work through the “Your customer’s story” exercise again. How has your story changed or evolved this week?

Timestamps:

0:00 introduction

2:40 key consideration: the “when” of each lever

6:44 questions you can ask to help you see whether or not you have achieved problem solution fit

9:52 this is how we can choose a growth lever

10:40 examples of levers and how they rank in terms of human proximity vs. measure scalability

13:06 why sometimes you want to refrain from going after scalable market channels

14:21 remember what we’re all trying to achieve: that moment when customers pull faster than we can push!