Find the Radioactive Core of Your Value

The most important first step in expanding sales is to find the “radioactive core” of your value. This is not always what you think it is so you need to talk to prospects and customers. But talking to people is tricky since you can’t really trust direct answers to our burning questions. This has caused some to claim that “customers are liars”. Are customers liars? Well, sort of — it depends on what you ask them and what you trust. Recently, I was developing a software idea around decision making. When I asked people about their internal process of team decision making, they went into detail about the process and problems about it. The details they provided and the passion they exhibited told me they were being honest. When I asked them if a defined process would help, they said yes. I thought this might be a lie. When I asked them if they would be open to trying a process through Survey Monkey, they said yes. Now this was easy to test since I asked them to actually do it. That cleared things up pretty quickly. They were lying, but not because they are evil. They were lying for the same reason that I sometimes lie. I want to be nice and I want to believe that I’ll be able to help someone. So we need to talk to a lot of people, ask direct and indirect questions, and look for trends of agreement in the responses we get. We need to ask questions like, “How do you solve this problem now?”, “What would it be worth to you to solve this problem?”, “If you like my solution, will you write a check to me now?” Ask people to commit to what they say quickly separates fact from fiction. If people have a big problem and are willing to actually try or pay for your solution, you are on to something. Find out why they want it so badly. This is your radioactive core of value.