Your First Deliverable: Curiosity
Katherine, an Account Executive at a Salesforce Partner, is preparing for a meeting with a prospect. They will use her company's technology in a pilot project. The prospect's engineering team will attend the meeting, asking a lot of technical questions. Katherine is bringing Emily, their Software Development Manager, to answer the questions. She respects Emily's technical talent and wants to make sure that Emily presents herself properly to the prospect. Emily feels nervous. She rarely goes on sales calls and worries about Katherine over-committing her team to get the deal.
Katherine meets with Emily to coach her on customer relations. Emily feels a vague dread about the meeting, not knowing Katherine's agenda. Katherine asks Emily what she does in a typical day. What does she struggle with? Katherine's interest surprises Emily. She complains about abrupt changes to product releases, usually because Sales needs unscheduled features to close a deal. Emily expresses skepticism that the disruptions in her team's schedule have any effect on deals. Katherine asks her for specific change requests by Sales. After thinking about it, Emily tells her about the most disruptive release changes. Katherine recalls the deals and looks up their value in Salesforce. The deals brought millions in revenue to the company. Emily asks when those deals closed. Katherine tells her, and Emily realizes that the revenue enabled her to add developers to her team.
Having found a new appreciation for Sales, Emily asks Katherine about her job. What challenges does she face? Katherine gives their upcoming call as an example. It took ten attempts to convince the prospect to try the pilot. Their company's legal department wants to change the contract terms, and she's fighting most of the changes. Emily realizes that they face similar frustrations, with external pressures disrupting and slowing down their work. Katherine points out that the pilot team probably faces challenges like Emily has, integrating new technology into their existing product. She encourages Emily to ask them about their challenges, in their language. Now, Emily looks forward to the meeting.
The meeting starts well, with Emily asking detailed questions about the prospect's product development process. This astonishes the pilot team, who did not expect Emily to take so much interest in how they work. They expected Emily to show off her technical knowledge and challenge their integration approach. Instead, the team appreciates Emily's questions - they indicate that she understands their project and its challenges. Emily's questions show her technical competence far more than her reciting what she knows. Everyone left the meeting excited and looking forward to working together.
Katherine expresses genuine curiosity about Emily's job, asking specific questions about her challenges. Emily responds in kind with curiosity, discovering that she and Katherine have more in common than she thought. Katherine persuades Emily to continue that professional curiosity with the customer. Emily's curiosity pleasantly surprises the customer team by showing her interest in their project, as well as her technical expertise.
Develop curiosity about what a customer needs from your solution and encourage stakeholders to have the same curiosity about customer needs.
Pervasive curiosity defies Solution Gravity.
Please share any story you have where curiosity about customer needs led to a more complete solution for your customer by defying Solution Gravity. We also welcome your questions, suggestions and challenges in the comments below.