Stop Guessing What Your Buyer Needs

When a company starts, a single product is often built based on one need. After a few customers are onboarded, feedback is gathered, and some growing pains are experienced, you start to notice common trends or language used across all conversations.

But how do you scale this up when it’s no longer a founder or sales team and a handful of customers but rather an ocean full of prospects that greatly outnumber you? What happens as markets change or new terms emerge? Technology is a great solution to many problems, but when you (and all your competitors) are using industry buzzwords that sound the same, it is hard for prospects to connect with how you will solve their problems in the language they use.

Building for Prospects

After you build up your customer base, you start to have a pool of users you can tap into for research. This includes not only the buying committee but the actual users of the product as well. You can ask questions, solicit feedback, see the bugs that are being reported, etc. While this information is really important, it still requires you to distill this information by hand into something that can be used by the sales and marketing teams when talking to prospects.

When your time is limited, especially in earlier-stage companies, talking to customers after the sale often falls by the wayside. On the flip side, in larger organizations where product teams talk to customers frequently, many of the notes and feedback don’t make their way back to the field. Connecting with prospects and building trust requires a deep understanding of their challenges, the words they use to describe those challenges, and consideration of any industry-related nuances.

Moreover, the majority of the buyer’s journey is already complete before they even talk to you. How do you access parts of the market that are not actively in conversation with you but may be looking for a solution? These buyers might be averse to talking to a salesperson in the first place, and you have to rely on other intent signals to determine what they need.

Getting Lost in Translation

Another core challenge that many organizations face is that sales teams have all of the access to prospects. As the face of the organization interacting with prospects every day, sales teams get access to a lot of data; however, they are notoriously bad at translating that data into something usable for the product team. The sales team will group the information they capture into a few common buckets to make it easier when talking to prospects, but this creates a dangerous downstream problem.

Prospects might use specific nomenclature, use cases, or even operationalization terms that get lost when the sales teams “bucketize” their notes. One could argue that call recording is a great way to have access to the raw data for product teams, but it still requires someone to sift through all of the noise to be useful for the product team. Additionally, if terms are used in different ways across the product and sales teams, there is further room for things getting lost in translation.

Stop Guessing, Start Learning

One of the greatest advances we have seen with the recent rise of AI is its ability to summarize large amounts of data. While summarization might yield more accurate results, you wouldn’t have access to the original queries made by the prospects themselves. The query matters just as much as the outcome. Using modern conversational technologies, we can actually preserve both the original query from the prospect and help identify where there are gaps in both existing content and the product.

For example, imagine a group of prospects looking for a solution to capture data about users who visit their website. The first prospect might ask about “website visitor metadata.” The next might use the term “website user visibility.” Ultimately, these prospects are looking for the same solution, but the language they use and how they phrase their query matters immensely for both identifying their needs and connecting with them in a way that resonates with them.

FullContext’s Buyer Copilot enables buyers to ask questions, interact with responses and content, or even spin up a product tour without engaging the sales team directly. This not only helps identify what terms matter most to those considering your product but also allows the insights to be shared back with sales, marketing, and product teams jointly to help keep internal teams aligned as well.

This also unlocks information from the larger market of visitors to your website, who may not engage directly with your sales team. Many of them are simply not up for the scheduling friction and close pressure that comes with being forced through traditional sales channels. Using this technology can help access insights about these buyers that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible.

Finally, you also get better intent data directly from prospects (vs. guessing at their intent through third-party channels). When it comes to taking the next step, sales teams are now armed with core use cases, challenges, etc., without having to run a robotic-sounding discovery session. Let’s stop guessing what our buyers want and learn what matters most in a way that benefits both buyers and sellers.