7 Benefits of Knowing Why Customers Buy Your Offering

“People don’t want to buy a ¼” drill; they want a ¼” hole!” – Theodore Levitt

Ultimately, customers don’t care about your offering or mine; they just want to get something done. It’s essential to identify the functional, emotional and social tasks that your customers want to get done with your offering. Here are 7 benefits of thinking about customer needs in this way:

1. We can determine what customers want to accomplish. While it is true that customers generally are not qualified to tell us product and service specifications (that’s the supplier’s responsibility), they can tell us what they want to accomplish. The question for customers is not “What do you want?” because that tends to elicit solutions but rather “What do you want to accomplish with my offering?”
2. We are not constrained by current solutions. When we capture customer needs as the tasks customers want to accomplish and the criteria they use to measure success totally independent of solutions, then our innovation efforts will not be constrained by current solutions. This significantly increases the likelihood of breakthrough innovation and dramatic growth.
3. We can gain a prioritized list of the target customers’ unmet needs. Because the need statements captured are totally independent of current solutions, we can have customers rate each need for importance and satisfaction and thereby prioritize them. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for value creation. This reveals where the best opportunities lie, makes resource allocation effective and efficient, and instills confidence about investment decisions.
4. We can identify the real competition. Although most leaders view their competition as those who sell the same category of product or service, this is only a small subset of the real competition. In reality, we compete with anything that customers use or do to get their task accomplished. For example, the core task that recreational users of snow mobiles are trying to get done is to “enjoy outdoor recreation with family and friends.” People use a wide array of sports recreation vehicles to accomplish this task such as ATVs, motorcycles, boats, and RVs. Beyond vehicles, they also engage in ski trips, snowshoeing, etc. Whatever customers do to “enjoy outdoor recreation with family and friends” is competing with snowmobiles. By focusing on the task customers want to accomplish, we can discover opportunities for growth that appeal to a broader set of customers – including non-customers – people who are not currently buying our category, but all of whom are trying to accomplish the same task.
5. We can establish competitive advantage. Not only can we obtain customers’ satisfaction ratings on our performance, but we can obtain satisfaction ratings on our top competitors performance as well. This reveals our competitive strengths and weaknesses from the customers’ point of view on every criterion that they deem important. This information enables us to establish a valued and unique position in the marketplace and a competitive advantage with precision.
6. We can predict what customers will value. It’s hard to hit a bull’s eye without a target. Knowing what customers are trying to accomplish, how they measure success, and where they currently struggle provides the solution team with the focus it needs to develop a winning solution that we can be confident customers will value.
7. We can stay relevant through turbulent times. Although competitive advantage is more difficult to sustain today because change is happening at an unprecedented rate, the tasks that people want to accomplish are remarkably stable over time.  That is, the things we’re trying to accomplish today are not that different from the things our parents and grandparents wanted to accomplish, e.g., get married, buy a house, have children, educate our children, maintain our health, enjoy recreation, go on vacation, stay apprised of current events, prepare for retirement, etc. What is changing rapidly is how we accomplish these tasks, the solutions we use to accomplish these tasks. To the extent that customer needs do change over time, it is often because other solutions they are using are continually being improved and, consequently, we must improve our offerings as well in order to address their changing circumstances with our offering. Technology is getting better and better, but is still is just a servant to help us accomplish the tasks we want to get done. Regardless of how tumultuous the change may be in our own industry, we always have a “North Star” by which to navigate through the rough seas if we keep our eyes focused on:

• • • The tasks customers want to accomplish
    • How they measure success, and
    • Where they struggle when trying to accomplish those tasks