In our last blog post, Ryan Patin introduced the Directional Questioning Methodology as a discovery technique to help sellers uncover the strategies, tactics, and emotional "pain and gain" affecting your customer's working environment. While there are plenty of discovery frameworks and methodologies available to sellers, the Directional Questioning Methodology is especially effective because of its broad applicability for almost any combination of sellers and scenarios.
The premise behind Directional Questioning is simple: sellers need to understand the strategic and tactical elements of their customer's requirements, and they need to understand the motivations behind those requirements. Those motivations, simply put, equate to fear, fame, and fortune. Your buyer makes decisions to avoid negative personal outcomes, to advance their personal brand, or to achieve some degree of personal gain that most often manifests itself financially.
"But wait," you might say, "certainly you're not suggesting that people make decisions entirely selfishly?" Well, yes, and no. As Nobel Prize-winning economist John Forbes Nash, Jr. put it, "the best for the group comes when everyone in the group does what's best for himself and the group" (emphasis added). As sellers, then, we need to uncover the corporate motivations and the individual motivations behind our buyers' requirements.
Unfortunately for the seller, he was never able to secure an executive audience, so his opportunity languished for more than a year. His problem was not with his pitch, his price, or his product. His problem was that, while his solution was great for the Director and his line of business, the Pro Desk wasn't where The Home Depot's executives were focusing their resources and attention. As the company focused their attention on loss prevention and consumer experience efforts, the Pro Desk team wasn't able to find an executive who would sponsor their project. From an AIM Methodology perspective, the seller found someone with Motivation, but his buyer didn't have the Authority to fund the project or the Influence to advance it.
The seller and his customer needed a way to connect their project to their executives' priorities. At Kahuoi, we have built our services around selling best practices, and the Balanced Scorecard Methodology is one of the ways that we help our customers to more effectively connect with their executive audiences. Let's dive into how it works.
Especially when speaking with an executive, it's important to understand their Baseline Perspective. This is the natural bias that your audience member's role will inject into your analysis. For example, while your Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer will obviously prioritize the respective financial and operational perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard, your Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Marketing Officer might prioritize some combination of financial and customer experience perspectives. That said, your objective is to find connections between the perspectives. For example, if the financial objective is to increase ecommerce revenue, what are the related operational and customer experience implications of a shift in strategy toward ecommerce and self-service?
Depending on the length and scope of your discovery session, it is entirely possible that you spend the entire time on a single perspective. If this is the case, you can use the Balanced Scorecard Methodology in concert with the AIM Methodology to book an additional discovery with stakeholders whose personas correspond with an adjoining perspective. And of course, Directional Questioning will help you to explore the strategies, tactics, goals and obstacles specific to your baseline.
Whether you've done so in a single call or across multiple sessions, the "balanced" component of the Balanced Scorecard means that each perspective is related to at least two others. For example, a customer who wants to improve profit margins will find that their financial objective has an operational implication (where can the company be more efficient to improve profits?), a customer perspective (how will cost-cutting efforts affect the customer experience?), and an organizational perspective (what changes to your technical or workforce assets might be required?).
In both cases - your baseline as well as joined perspectives - be sure to document the associated objectives, named initiatives (projects), and measures of success.
When you feel you've got a good idea of your customer's perspectives, consider how strategies and objectives connect to one another, within and across perspectives. This provides an outline of the major company priorities that your executives will care about. When you build your business case (case for change, solution design, and financial case), be sure to connect your personas, perspectives, and related strategic elements. This will maximize your odds of success for you and your customer alike.