In B2B sales, achieving a repeatable sales motion is the Holy Grail for any business. Validating the problem statement you are solving for, and ensuring that your buyer has an intent is crucial. Understanding these concepts and their interplay can significantly impact your ability to close deals consistently. Let's delve into what these terms mean and explore their implications on your sales strategy.
Problem Validation is the process of confirming that the problem you are solving is recognised and acknowledged by your target audience. It's about ensuring that the pain points you address are real and significant enough for potential customers to consider solutions. Without a validated problem, your sales efforts may fall flat, as you risk trying to sell solutions to problems that buyers don’t care about.
Buying Intent is the the measure of how strongly a buyer is willing to make a pay for your offering. This involves gauging whether a potential buyer has the intent to buy, influenced by factors such as budget availability, urgency, and decision-making power within the organisation.
Validating problems and Measuring Buying Intent
You can run Problem Validation and Buying Intent experiments on your Customer Profile using Aspiro. Try it out today.
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Before you start scaling your sales efforts, you need to validate your problem with your customers and measure their buying intent. The following scenarios arise when you measure them-
Validated Problem but Weak Buying Intent
💡 Potential Reason 1- Persona is not capable/empowered/influential enough to pay: Even if the problem is acknowledged, if the person you're engaging with lacks the authority or budgetary control, the sale is unlikely to proceed.
💡 Potential Reason 2- Persona has other "higher priority problems": Sometimes, your solution addresses a real problem, but other issues take precedence. If your problem area is not important enough for your buyer to solve, you might need to search for neighboring or completely different problems to solve.
💡 Potential Reason 3- Budget not earmarked for this problem: Even with validated problems, if the buyer and their company don’t have any dedicated budget for solving this problem, the buying process may stall. Here, educating the prospect on the ROI and helping them justify the budget internally can be effective.
High Buying Intent but Weakly Validated Problem
💡 Potential Reason 1- Unrealistic/misinformed product expectations: Buyers may show interest based on misconceptions or overestimations of your product’s capabilities. Or maybe your website/sales process misguides them unintentionally. If this is happening, working on your call scripts or updating copy of your website and sales collateral might be effective.
💡 Potential Reason 2- Hot market trend to spend in your problem area: Interest driven by market trends can lead to a surge in buying intent. AI tools were bought unnecessarily in 2023 and DevOps tools were bought without need in 2016. However, without a genuine need, customers will eventually churn.
💡 Potential Reason 3- Curiosity-driven purchase: Sometimes, prospects buy out of curiosity rather than necessity. If your pitch seems very revolutionary/novel etc. which peaks prospect’s interest, this might happen a lot. This also happens when your product is cheaper than necessary.
💡 Potential Reason 4- Purchase is risk free/inexpensive for buyer: Low-cost or low-risk purchases might not reflect a real commitment to solving a problem. While they can lead to quick wins, ensuring your product is indispensable is necessary for long-term retention.
Weakly Validated Problem and Low Buying Intent
💡 Oh no! Need for a major pivot- It probably is a time to reassess your strategy. This might involve pivoting your messaging (website/sales/marketing), targeting other personas, or even rethinking your product offering. In most cases, you need a complete shift in the problem area that you are attacking on and minor product revamps or GTM revamps don’t help.
Validated Problem and High Buying Intent
When both problem validation and buying intent align, the path to sales success is clear. Prospects recognize the problem, see the value in your solution, and are ready to invest.