I don’t like repeating myself, but sometimes it is necessary.
Consultants from all disciplines need to conduct discovery sessions to help them understand the challenges a company faces. Through open-ended questions, insights can emerge the will help define the problem to be solved.
On a recent assignment, I found that I repeated the same question over and over again.
How do you know this?
What emerged from various interview sessions was my client repeating the phrase,
I just know. It always works this way.
Discovery Tells Us About Tomorrow
When you are doing a marketing, financial or operational discovery session, you want to understand the context of the past, but more importantly is how to anticipate what is coming tomorrow.
- How do you know that the customer’s you have been selling to aren’t buying less because their world has experienced disruption?
- How do you know if the choices and options your customer has had for the last ten years have changed so much that you are no longer top of mind?
- How do you know that the people you view as competitors aren’t the only people going after your customer’s dollar?
Business teams need to challenge themselves and find ways to understand a buyer’s motivation. And, you can’t rely on history as predictive of any future behavior.
Just because the old locomotive train arrived in your small town for 20 years at 10:32 am, doesn’t mean the new high-speed rail will follow the same rules.
Could your business use a discovery session to help define the essence of the challenges you face? Are you too close to your business to be objective? Let’s talk. 919 720 0995 or email me at jeffslater@themarketingsage.com – use my calendar to schedule a call for a quick chat.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
