My team spans timezones and continents and first languages and areas of expertise. We manage ongoing customers and new project implementations. In the pre-pandemic days, we crossed oceans and land masses to learn and laugh and share together.

For most of us, the pandemic hasn’t been easy. We’ve been uprooted from routine, separated from our family and friends, or maybe, quarantined too close to them. My team has stood strong through the changing dynamic and I’ve learned a lot from them. My team

• Thrives on challenges – As our customers were responding to the pandemic and pushing us for solutions, my team got engaged and excited to deliver on those solutions. They truly looked to the uncertainty as opportunity and delivered on it.
• Supports each other – as life continued, we together celebrated successes and life events and showed compassion to schedule changes or adjusted to uncertainty. They showed flexibility and compassion with each other and sometimes with themselves.
• Craves the connection – not surprising given the general closeness of the team, but the remote work left us all craving our connections to each other. Zoom fatigue and increased workloads and life interruptions makes it hard to prioritize those virtual meetings, but 1:1 check-ins were much appreciated.
• Needs to smell the flowers more (and nurture the roots) – sometimes we get so caught up in the issues of the day, we forget to focus on how far we’ve come or what else we need to do to cultivate our roots to make our ecosystem stronger.
• Needs more bees – Just like nature, we need an army of bees to bounce around between the team members, and expertise and cross pollinate the knowledge. As an organization, we have a fairly strong set of documentation but still have challenges with its maintenance and ensuring it’s consumed and recalled when it’s needed.

Clearly, I have spring on my mind given the flower and bees analogies. I’ve been very lucky to have the team that I’ve had during this most challenging of times. We did a see a bit of turnover, but we were also able to bring on some new talent that invigorated the team dynamic, despite the remote onboarding and continued work. We continue to get challenged by what is going on in the world, but I know that we’ll be able to pull together to deliver the best we can.

I’ve often found myself in roles at the intersection of sales, professional services and support (and as an extension, product, although not directly relevant to today’s post.) Throughout my career, my selling style has really evolved into the valued partner, solution expert who can help customers or prospects leverage whatever product/service I’ve been associated with to solve their problems. I’ve noticed recently that it’s much less about the product or service, and much more about aligning to the dream.

It used to be that I would leverage our core values to demonstrate how we can fill the gaps in each organization. As a general matter, this helped establish myself as an expert, but it didn’t resonate as well with my audiences because they would latch on to one or two smaller points rather than grasp the big picture. My next shift had me emphasizing truly meeting customers where there are to solve very specific problems and using that as a basis for a broader conversation of what solving those problems will enable them to do and how it will help them solve much broader goals. I think there is still another evolution in the language of value and being able to leverage your content, your demo, your expertise to enable your audience to truly connect your words and images with their dreams (realized or unrealized).

As I mull through this problem, I started some research and came across The Secret to Selling SaaS – Value vs. Product blog post that references this phenomenon as ‘crossing the chasm’ and states “a customer can go 57% of the way through the buyer’s journey, but still not understand what you’re selling.” And this is very much describes what I’ve been feeling like recently.

An extension of this problem is that the disconnected conversation often results into a directional shift focused more on price and feature/functionality versus really aligning to the audiences goals and vision. Ultimately these opportunities are smaller and less valuable to the customer.

I think my biggest take away so far is that I shouldn’t second guess my methodology and thought process around the importance of having discovery calls and understanding the problem we’re trying to solve before jumping right into to demos and technical discussions. Without it, you can lose your grip on the opportunity and can’t possible promote the right value proposition if you don’t fully understand the audience or their goals.