When clients come to me, they nearly always want this one thing.
To make more money — more revenue, moula, and cash flow; to increase their sales.
They’ll say something like:
How can I increase sales?
How can I generate more revenue?
How can I get my customer to buy more?
What new product or service can I develop?
They’ll want me to create a strategy and action plan to achieve these. However, there is a far better way to think about this.
Instead of asking yourself how you can generate more sales or what product/service should I create next, reframe your thinking to this⤵
How can I become the better solution to an existing problem or pain point my customer, or future customer, has?
What problem can I solve, and how can I solve it better than anyone else?
The world doesn’t need more products or businesses.
What it does need is better solutions to existing problems.
This type of problem-first thinking is essential for several reasons:
1. It gives you the opportunity to find a unique and better solution to an existing problem than other products on the market. So by thinking about the problem first, you’ll have a fresh perspective on solutions compared to what already exists.
2. If your product solves an existing problem, you’ll already have a built-in customer base that you know will gain value from your new product.
3. Using a problem-first approach will also make it easier to create more products relevant to your business, product family and brand.
Coming up with a solution before you know the problem you’re solving can be detrimental to innovation. Once you have a solution in mind, it’s easy to become fixated on it — even if you know in your gut that it might not be the best one. It’s similar to answering a question before knowing what the question is. You can certainly take an educated guess, but it’s usually going to be off the mark.
