Acute v Chronic
Whenever I feel an ache or pain coming on, I’m always recalling Henny Youngman.
“The patient says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." The doctor says, "Then don't do that!”
― Henny Youngman
Unfortunately, the kind of pain an organization feels may relate to customer delivery or directly to the org's commercial success. Simply avoiding it is not an option. However, addressing that pain can be very similar to how we address our own pain. We either tolerate it, management it, live with it and move on. Or, we do something to address the root cause that is causing that pain. Whether the pain is acute or chronic can have a big impact on the choice. It’s the same choice organizations face.
In our first post on Identified Pain, we stressed the importance of digging deep to identify that root pain that ties to the Metric and can be expressed as significant value to the customer and Economic Buyer. I’m not going say which pain, acute or chronic, is best to identify. This depends on many factors, including the pain your solution attempts to address. What you need to ensure is that you know what pain you are dealing with and that it is the right pain to generate the most value for your solution.
Youngman’s joke focuses on Acute pain. It tends to be the most intense pain and the most communicated. It’s short-lived and usually associated with a specific task. Although often not perceived, a single root-cause can create many pain-points along a process path. This creates problems for finding a solution to the root-cause. The pain will be unique to each individual and team along the process path. Each will lay blame with the team upstream. Sadly, it will be that team just prior to the final objective that receives the most blame. “We failed to reach our goal because the reports were late and inaccurate.” If the objective is crucial and pain intense enough, pressure will motivate every team along the path to find a solution to their unique pain. I’m unable to count the number of times I’ve seen a marketing or finance team come seeking a new reporting solution because they feel their BI team is not responding to their needs and jeopardizing their success.
Chronic pain, though not nearly as intense, is more commonly felt broadly across the organization. It’s an enterprise pain. Where acute pain will be expressed in terms of failure, such as delayed, late, inaccurate, incomplete, and missing, chronic will sound more like a grumble and expressed in terms of frustration. Yet, chronic pain, given potential scale, can carry extreme value. However, building a case to address the root-cause can be challenging if the distributed pain is not intense enough to motivate action. In my experience, I’ve heard chronic pain expressed in terms of acute pain at the lower levels. Unfortunately, unless it gains the attention of leadership and executive decision makers, any request to purchase a technical solution will be deemed too expensive and those feeling the pain will just have to get on with it.
Armed with this understanding. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself.
Do you know what type of pain your solution best addresses?
Does your selling approach match that type of pain?
If you’re an enterprise solution, are you sure have identified the root-cause for the chronic pain?
If you have a collection of acute pain, can you tie them to a root-cause and express as an enterprise-wide chronic pain?
Is leadership aligned with the type of pain identified and the value associated?
When you better understand the pain expressed, you create an opportunity to identify more value. The pain may be unique, but acute pain is rarely felt by a single team. Look up and down the process. Find those additional pain-points and the teams feeling that pain. You’ll be able to increase the impact of your solution and the value it provides. Help your customer to make the case. If you have what seems like several independent expressions of acute pain, seek out the root-cause that ties them together. You may help the customer discover that severe chronic pain felt broadly across the organization and impacting performance.
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