What Specific Problems Do You Want to Solve?

Without a clear idea of the problems you want to solve for your customers, you may end up building a generic business that just blends into the background and gets lost in the noise.

It comes down to supply and demand. Unless your training or consulting services are truly revolutionary, prospective customers will have dozens or even hundreds of alternative options to choose from.

If your value proposition looks exactly like your competitors’, then you’ll be going head-to-head against every one of them, with nothing to truly set you apart.

A Quick Example

Imagine you’re in the market to have your business website completely redesigned from the ground up. You’ve never worked with a professional web developer before, and aren’t really sure of what questions to ask or what you’ll need to know in order to end up with a website that drives more revenue for your business.

You don’t just have a “website design” problem.

But as you shop around, you notice a lot of agencies and individuals whose primary messaging is generically based on “website design.”

Who should you pick? Since they all seem pretty much the same, your choice will likely come down to random things like:

• Luck—whoever happens to come up first in a search.
• Price—whoever happens to be least expensive.
• Convenience—whoever happens to be the easiest to buy from.

Now imagine that you come across a small agency whose messaging seems to have been custom-made just for you.

Right there on their homepage, they hit on the same specific problems you’re facing—trainers, consultants, and coaches who need a completely redesigned website in order to drive higher revenue, but who don’t have a lot of experience with website development, and need someone to guide them through the myriad decisions they’ll need to make in order to get the exact outcomes they’re looking for.

In other words, this design business has a clear idea of the problems they want to solve, unlike the majority of generic designers out there that all seem pretty much the same.

You may be asking, “but what about all the other types of website design projects that don’t fit that description? Won’t they be limiting themselves and losing all those other types of customers?”

No. Since they’re not the only design studio in the world, the likelihood of them winning a significant number of other types of projects with a generic “we design websites” approach is exceedingly small.

Sure, they’ll get lucky once in a while. And the truth is that many of these generic businesses do attract some customers. But they usually do so at a significant cost—either spending way too much on ads in hopes of being in the right place at the right time, or dropping their fees to compete on price, or working on projects for which they’re not a great fit.

In the meantime, the small agency I mentioned above, the one with the clear idea of the problems they want to solve, isn’t pulling themselves in a million different directions or dropping their prices in order to compete.

Because they know they can’t be everything to everybody, they focus on being the perfect fit for just the right customers.

What Gets in the Way?

• Fear of choosing the wrong problems to solve.
• Fear of missing out on possible customers and projects that don’t have the specific problems you solve.
• Choosing problems based on immediate demand and market trends, instead of which ones you’re best able to solve and most passionate about solving.
• Jumping ahead to thinking about your solutions (catchy headlines, taglines, hooks, and CTAs).

To Make the Right Decision, Ask Yourself…

• Has my business’s growth stalled because I haven’t been specific enough about the problems I solve?
• What would happen if I focused on solving the types of problems that match my strengths and interests?
• What am I willing to do differently starting today?

Schedule Your Complimentary Strategy Call

If you’d like to explore ways to design your messaging around the right customer problems, I’d be happy to help guide you through some of the obstacles that may be keeping you stuck.

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