Progress your customer's opportunity like a pro

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a customer asks about feature X, and you respond with a simple yes, no, or "it's on the roadmap," only to have the conversation end prematurely? This article is written for professionals in sales organizations, such as Sellers or Solutions Architects, to share insights that can help them better engage with customers and progress opportunities.

Peel the onion of needs

When a customer expresses interest in a specific feature, your primary goal should be to delve deeper into their request to understand the underlying driver. Keep asking probing, open-ended questions until you uncover one of the core needs all customers have: 1/ Cutting costs, 2/ Streamlining operations, 3/ Managing business risks, or 4/ Improving customer experience.

As an Edge Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, here are some examples from my area of expertise:

• Cutting costs: Origin Shield (to decrease origin scaling costs), Shield Advanced (to waive WAF costs), Bot management (to remove costs from undesired bot traffic)
• Streamlining operations: Native image optimization (to reduce maintenance efforts), Terraform support (to deploy using CI/CD pipelines)
• Managing business risks: DDoS protection (to manage availability risks), Bot management (to reduce denial of inventory risks), local delivery in Europe (to avoid GDPR compliance risks)
• Improving customer experience: HTTP/3 (for faster website loading and better conversion rates), multi-CDN (for lower buffering rates).

When you identify one or more of these core needs, you've successfully peeled the onion, removing distortions that may have affected the customer's initial expression of their needs. This puts you in a better position to serve your customer and progress the opportunity.

Don't hesitate to ask your customers probing questions like:

• What would you like to achieve with feature X? ...because we want to drive outcome Y.
• What makes you to focus your energy on outcome Y? ... because we want to achieve outcome Z.
• Why is outcome Z important to you? ...because we want...to CUT COSTS (bingo).
• What else is important for you (continue probing)?

Put numbers on them

Once you've identified the core needs, prioritize them and understand their magnitude. Sometimes there's just one primary need, like improving customer experience. Other times, it's a combination, such as cost-cutting and streamlining operations. At this stage, you need to understand the weight of each need, the customer's expectations, and what trade-offs they're willing to make. Some example probing questions:

• By how much would you like to decrease your costs? A 10% reduction suggests incremental improvements, while a 50% reduction might indicate willingness for significant changes or migrations.
• What is more important to you, cutting costs or streamlining operations? Some customers even assign weights to these needs in formal RFPs, such as 70% for cost-cutting and 30% for streamlining operations.
• To improve your customer experience by 20%, by how much are you willing to increase your costs?

Navigate the universe of possibilities

By identifying core needs and quantifying them, you create a broader universe of possible solutions to explore. Let's contrast two scenarios from my area of expertise:

Take 1 - Do you have an Origin Shield feature? Yes, awesome, problem solved, or no, sorry, then considering another provider.

Take 2 - Do you have an Origin Shield feature? .... Peeling the onion... you figure out that your customer wants to cut their content delivery costs, and they read about how this feature can help them do that. At this point, you start exploring all what customers can do to reduce their infrastructure costs, with or without your products and services:

• Content compression can reduce the data transfer out cost.
• Lazy loading of images at application level, can also reduce the data transfer out cost.
• Reviewing the content delivery contract for potential cost-saving options.
• Improve caching policy to increase the cache hit ratio
• Block undesired traffic from reaching the application using a WAF
• Moving the origin stack to more cost-effective compute options, like AWS Graviton-based CPUs
• etc..

In this scenario, even if you don't have the Origin Shield feature, you're not blocking the conversation. If you do have it, you're delighting the customer by helping them achieve their core goals beyond their initial expression. Additionally, you elevate the conversation to a more strategic level, positioning yourself as a true trusted advisor.

It takes two to tango

One caveat to note is when the customer isn't open to such an in-depth conversation. They may require immediate answers due to tight timelines or be constrained by a formal process. In such scenarios, refrain from extensive probing during the initial conversation and respond precisely to their closed questions. However, always offer to have a more in-depth discussion later, explaining the benefits of this approach.

By following these strategies, you can transform simple inquiries into meaningful conversations that address your customers' core needs and position your solutions more effectively.