Answering the only four questions that matter

The most fearsome and insidious enemy you will face as a business owner or organization leader won’t be a competitor or the shifting market environment. It will be prioritization.

We try to tell ourselves – and I’m as guilty of this as anyone – that our core problems lie elsewhere:

“We don’t have enough content for this specific segment.”

“We aren’t doing enough outbound.”

 “We’re losing people at X point in the journey.”

“Our story is inconsistent.”

 “Our onboarding program isn’t driving adoption.”

Make no mistake, these are all problems worth solving. I’d wager that the root cause, though, is an inability to ruthlessly prioritize what work needs to be done now and what needs to be placed in the parking lot or put on hold.

Like so many simple-sounding things, prioritization can be phenomenally difficult. And it gets harder with every new milestone, new product, new partner and new hire. The more resources you have at your disposal, the harder it is to figure out exactly how you should be deploying them.

It’s a topic with a ton of nuance and subjectivity and noise about how you should be “fixing” it. Anyone who has ever tried to create a RACI matrix knows that, while it sounds good in theory (and does work in some cases), the process feels like repeatedly burning your finger with a lit match.

We’re not going to get deep into the untangling part in this edition. Instead, we’ll start back at the beginning. While it’s still not easy, the time when prioritization is least complex is when your business or organization is smallest. When it’s just you and your ideas, getting to the strength of purpose doesn’t seem quite as difficult.

And during this time, your bandwidth and resources are crystal clear; you know exactly what you can and cannot do, and that knowledge, combined with your understanding of who your product is for and why they should care, is what drives concrete prioritization decisions. Even if you’re well beyond this stage, there’s value in transporting yourself back to those days (or, if you weren’t there at the time, using your imagination).

Once again, something that’s easier said than done. “Strip away the complexity” sounds good in a vacuum, but if it was that simple, you would have already done it. My favorite way to do this in practice is to spend time asking yourself and answering what I call the Foundational Four.

Four questions that, if you can believe and align with your team on the answers, set the foundation for what your organization needs to do to thrive. Starting here will make all of your ongoing prioritization work possible.

Prioritization issues don’t fester because you and your people aren’t invested enough; quite the opposite. If you’ve built a good team, they care about what you’re trying to do, they want to do the best they can in their roles, they want to exceed expectations, and they want to support your clients and customers. And what you’ll find is that, often, their ability to do these things will put them at odds with other employees who are trying to satisfy their own versions of these goals.

Alignment on what I’ll call the only four questions that truly matter puts critical parameters around the most important goals for the organization. If you can manage it, filtering every new idea, project, initiative and request through that lens will help you not only re-prioritize existing work; it will help you avoid letting prioritization issues build up in the future.

The Foundational Four

Ask and answer these questions in the order they’re shown below:

Who is the person who will get the most value from my product or service?

If you’re not a career marketer or salesperson, the term “ICP” probably makes you think of clown makeup and Faygo soda. Same here. But it also happens to be an acronym for Ideal Customer Profile, which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of characteristics of the person or customer who would most benefit from and be most satisfied with your product or service.

Simple, right? Unfortunately, like so many of our pretty new pets, this is where we blow it.

First, we immediately make it about us. It’s not about finding the customers who would get the most value, it’s about who it’s easiest for us to sell to! Second, we either include too much detail or too little; less is more with a good Ideal Customer Profile, but if your characteristics are too broad, you won’t be able to speak to the specifics that make people pay attention (“What’s in it for me?”). Third, we confuse our Ideal Customer Profile with target segments; you can only have ICP, but if you think it’s helpful, you can have many target segments.

There’s enough detail on building these profiles to fill many newsletters, and there’s already a ton of great information out there (I especially like this post from Cognism). For our purposes here, I’ll give you a few of my make-or-break tips:

• Focus your profile on the customer (individual), not the company. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will disagree with this, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why you would want to dehumanize and de-personalize your profile by removing the person from it (especially in the sterilized robot hell we seem intent on allowing to happen).

  
  

• Keep your focus on practicality. A great profile should include enough information to give you a clear picture of the individual who would be the absolute best fit for your product or service and, importantly, to allow you to take action. Adding extraneous information, like we tend to do with personas (we don’t care about someone’s sushi order if we’re selling them project management software), only confuses the issue. If you’re adding something, make sure it’s because you think you can use it.

  
  

• LISTEN TO YOUR SALES AND CUSTOMER SUCCESS PEOPLE! Common sense? You would think so. I’ve seen these profiles created at the executive level, led by the marketing team, and folks, that’s never going to work. The sales and customer success teams are the ones who are talking to your actual prospects and customers the most, and they know who is really getting value from your products and, even more importantly, what they’re actually doing with them vs. what you think you designed them for.

You may already have a good sense of your ICP. Even if you do, it’s worth revisiting at least annually, and maybe even more frequently. Because if you get the ICP wrong, every element of your marketing and sales will be less effective.

Why are people buying my product or service, and why are others not buying from me?

You know how people are always saying you learn more from falling on your face than winning? They’re right. For the sake of your organization, though, you should be aggressively trying to understand both.

In the cases of a win (closed deal), what you’re looking for here isn’t some golden moment where the customer went magically from unaware that you existed to purchasing a huge contract. Yet, that’s how we often treat win reports. You should absolutely be celebrating the terms of the deal and the hard work in the Slack channel, and then you should be looking at anything and everything you can glean about why the deal happened.

What you’re likely to find is a combination of factors: they discovered they had a big problem, they tried to solve it themselves and found one of your old YouTube videos, they liked it enough to watch one of the new podcast episodes, they asked ChatGPT about you, they went to your website and found the information they were looking for, they decided to fill out the contact form and your sales representative was extremely helpful, they still waited three more months because they got busy and went out of town, then they signed the agreement in a rush because they needed something in place before their next event. What does the win report say? “Cold outreach.”

For losses, there’s nothing more valuable than being able to get in touch with a prospect who didn’t choose to make the purchase. You might be surprised how many people are willing to talk to you. Most business owners and leaders simply don’t ask. If you can’t do this, the next best thing is listening to the sales calls leading up to the prospect choosing not to move forward.

Because you’re relying on salespeople and marketers to fill these things in, don’t put too much stock in individual responses. People are going to act in their best interest, and that usually means they’ll give themselves more credit than they deserve for wins and take less credit than they deserve for losses. Your goal is getting them to enter this information for every single prospect and customer so that you can review it to identify patterns; when you have enough data, the evidence will show itself.

These reports, sales and customer calls, your intuition, the honest feedback from your most trusted people (department-agnostic), and actual customer and prospect feedback combine to help you answer these questions. And if you trust the answers, prioritizing work to fix any holes should be the very next action you take.

Why are people who have bought my product or service renewing or making another purchase, and why are others not renewing or making another purchase?

The other side of the coin from #2. Speaking of coins, if I had a quarter for every time I’ve seen organizations put way too many resources toward acquiring new business and not nearly enough toward retaining current customers, I’d have so many quarters.

If you have a great customer success team, they’re likely already tracking this information. With the win/loss situation, the problems can stem from not gathering the data, bad data or not paying enough attention to it. With retention, the problem is more often that resources are pulled away from the customer side of the business or they were never allocated there in the first place.

You’ve undoubtedly seen this stat of dubious provenance: “It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer.” I couldn’t find the original study, apparently from Lee Resources in 2010, so take it with a grain of salt. Whether or not you believe the exact numbers, the stat does make sense on the surface. Saving money is always great; what I think we don’t talk about enough is the long-term cost on not focusing enough on the actual customer experience.

Understanding the true reasons why someone did or did not renew or make another purchase, which generally requires more than an end-of-contract survey (get them on the phone if at all possible), is a good start. I prefer, if they’ll give me the time, to walk through the highlights of their experience. While it’s sometimes one reason (e.g., unexpected price increase), it’s just as frequently a series of interactions that paints a picture of a disappointing overall experience.

If you identify a number of gaps in your customer experience, you’re going to hit a prioritization obstacle at this stage. Do you focus on the new business or retention gaps first?

That’s impossible to answer without looking at a variety of factors; my warning is not to automatically discount retention in favor of new business. The reality is that, if you have retention issues and are continuing to pump money and resources into new business, those people are more than likely coming in the front door and exiting right out the back.

Why are people referring my product, service and organization to their peers, and why are others not doing the same?

If you need more backing for a stronger focus on the customer experience (post-sale), it’s that low satisfaction doesn’t just hurt your retention numbers. It hurts new business sales too, by limiting how many people refer you to their friends, family, colleagues and, in some cases, total strangers.

I don’t care if your company makes billions of dollars or you’re grinding toward your first $10,000. Referrals matter a lot.

And I’m not just talking about direct referrals that you can track, like a warm introduction. I’m talking about “dark referrals,” a term I made up to try to sound cool. These are the offhand comments people make to their friends about your products and services, the “Did you know there’s a person/organization/company doing this really well?” mentions, the “When you’re ready, you should talk to person about that” asides.

These referrals are the outcomes of having a strong reputation, not just for interesting advertising (although that can be helpful), but for being very good at what you do, being reliable and earning trust. Where we tend to go wrong is looking at customer satisfaction as only a customer retention metric. Happy customers lead to both repeat business and new business, and getting to the real reasons is always worth the effort.

It will be easier to get the information from happy customers on whey they choose to refer you. Make sure you’re asking questions that allow you to get below the surface level: “We love working with you.” That’s always great to hear, but you’re looking for the nuggets about why. In addition to identifying the areas you hang your hat on when it comes to your experience, you can also turn around and use these nuggets in your prospecting and sales conversations.

Why people are not referring is more difficult to glean. Your best bet here is having direct conversations with the customers you trust above all others. They are likely already referring you, but they may also tell you the truth about any blind spots you might have.

This is going to sound harsh, but you need to hear it. If you can’t answer these four questions right now, you need to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing in your organization and dig until you reach the answers.

Especially as you grow, prioritization will constantly be nipping at your heels and threatening to slow you down or derail you completely. The best way to keep the issue at bay is to be crystal clear on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and these four questions will help you build that framework.

As I’ve said before, it’s not easy and it does take effort and a level of vulnerability. Once you do the work, whether for the first time or as a kind of hard reset, it will make everything else a bit easier.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re interested in talking through any specifics or have questions for me on applying any of this information to your work or organization, email me at dan@heliosmarketingllc.com or send me a message through my contact form.

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