The authors’ studies have shown that to sharpen your scanning capabilities and increase your chances of spotting Customer problems and aspirations, you must diversify how and where you look. The 4-part framework can be useful for salespeople in their work in identifying a wider range of needs of Customers that they can sell to. It revolves around 2 approaches:

• Look at the mainstream users of your products and services. Improve your vision about their usage

• Next, turn your focus to unconventional users. Challenge your vision about how they use your products and services

For each of these two user groups,

• you could take an up-close view (‘zoom in’ as the authors call it) or
• you may step back and take a wider view (‘zoom out’)

Bringing the two approaches together with the depth or width of the view you take, the authors arrive at a 2x2 matrix of 4 strategies that can be used to identify unmet needs of borrowers.

Below is a summary of the 4 strategies derived from the matrix. Also listed are ideas on how they could possibly be used by salespeople to add greater value to Customers and in the process sell better and more

1. 1. The Microscope Strategy
   • Zoom in on the usage experiences of mainstream users
   • Observe them while they actually use your product or service
   • This can help you spot needs, "not surfaced by focus groups, interviews, or questionnaires"
   • Like a microscope, this strategy brings into view needs hidden in small details

   Possible Sales Application – A B2B capital equipment sales person observing Customers finds that most of them have questions and doubts about the newly installed machinery in the weeks that follow the installation. This results in calls and mails and avoidable anxiety on both sides. This can point to an unmet need for a post-sales service of making a dedicated expert available on call for handholding and responding to queries for a month after the installation is completed

2. 2. The Panorama Strategy
   • Keep your focus on mainstream users
   • But step back to look at their aggregated behaviour
   • From aggregated data on usage elements like errors, complaints or reported product or process deficiencies, you can discover patterns that lead you to needs that are unmet
   • Panorama, as the word indicates, is a wide-angle view

   Possible Sales Application – This is where the sales professional acts as a bridge between the product team and Customers. In the course of prospecting and following up with Customers who have bought already, the salesperson is able to isolate patterns in complaints and grievances that throw up an entirely new need or a necessity to tweak the features of the existing product, creating a new offering in the process

3. 3. The Telescope Strategy
   • Turn your attention to non-conventional users, outside your core area
   • Find out more about how they use your product or service
   • This knowledge can bring up new, hitherto unnoticed needs to be served
   • Telescopes bring within view, objects that are far away. So, does this strategy, picking up unmet needs that may lie beyond the core

   Possible Sales Application – The article shares a fascinating story from the experience of consumer appliance manufacturer Haier. Faced with a recurring pattern of complaints about clogged drainage hoses in washing machines from rural Customers, Haier investigated the issue, only to find that Customers were using the machines to wash root vegetables before shipping them to markets! Haier reengineered the machines so that they could be used for both purposes, leading to more sales and market leadership in laundry equipment

4. 4. The Kaleidoscope Strategy
   • Challenge your current perspective on typical user profiles whose needs you meet
   • Are there any distant user groups, whose needs are tied to your product or service?
   • Now pick out commonalities that could surface an unmet need
   • This is very similar to seeing new patterns in a kaleidoscope

   Say the authors: "The difficulty, especially for entrepreneurs working within an established company, is to think beyond the usual suspects, such as suppliers, distributors, and competitors"

Possible Sales Application – “What Customer problems is my product solving?” “Are there any Customer problems that I’m missing?” are questions salespeople should be asking all the time as they prepare to move from one deal to another. In a study of usage behaviour made famous by late Prof Clayton Christensen, Customers buying milkshakes to carry into their metro rides, weren’t looking for more flavours. They wanted thicker shakes that would last them the entire ride and help them pass time in a healthy way. So, that simple tweak sent the milkshake sales soaring

Mercuri International encourages salespeople to always keep in mind the distinction between ‘need for the product’ and ‘need in usage’ as this can alert them to opportunities in the form of unmet needs discussed above. But to be able to do that, one has to be prepared to observant before, during and after a sale, combining an innovation mindset with a preparation mindset