How do you discover the root cause of a problem for your champion and level that problem up to a larger more painful organizational problem?

This is an excellent question, though providing a singular, straightforward answer can be challenging.

Identifying root causes can range from straightforward to highly complex. Regardless, proficiency in the following areas is essential:

• Customer Use Cases: Understanding ROI, persona-specific value, and the broader strategic context.

• Value Mapping: If your champion understands the value but hasn't identified the root cause pain your solution addresses, it's your responsibility to reverse engineer this pain point and help align the buyer on how they will sell the solution internally.

Sales Cycle Complexity: Understanding the complexity of your sales cycle is crucial. If you're operating within a shorter cycle with early involvement from decision-makers, root cause identification might occur swiftly. However, elevating the conversation to connect the champion's pain point to a broader strategic initiative will be key in securing executive buy-in.

In strategic, enterprise cycles, the root cause may be more elusive. You'll need a plan to identify the people, processes, and work streams your solution enables or optimizes. The good news is that an enterprise strategic cycle is essentially a series of smaller cycles managed with a champion over an extended period. The following context will still apply, but understand that in a strategic cycle, you're always "on" and need to be hyper-aware of moving all evaluating parties through each step. This can be challenging if you're not accustomed to creating professional pressure.

When pursuing root cause discovery in either scenario, consider the following:

Uncovering Strategic Initiatives: To help your champion elevate the problem to align with organizational priorities, consider the following approaches:

• Understand Executive Priorities: Ask your champion what their senior leadership cares about. If strategic language is absent, this may indicate that your champion lacks the seniority needed to push the purchasing request to the right stakeholders.

• Leverage Company Messaging: Ask what is being communicated in company-wide meetings or all-hands sessions. Identify key themes or strategic initiatives that leadership is emphasizing. If the messaging is high-level (e.g., "We need to move faster"), determine who owns that initiative and gather additional context to position your champion's request accordingly.

• Collaborate on Strategic Messaging: If your champion is more junior, you may need to brainstorm strategic root causes or initiative language together. This exercise can help them better communicate the value proposition in a way that resonates with decision-makers, framing the ask within broader strategic objectives.

Now that you've aligned with you buyer on the larger strategic initiative, and hopefully aligned on pain. All you're doing is creating sales process that demonstrates the implication of said pain in the abscence of a solution AND the what happens on the other side of a sales process.

I call this "selling value day." That is, we are usually spending the majority of our time selling the process, rather than the outcome, or even the pain. But in order to do this, I recommend that you come up with a few ways to standardize things that will help you maintain professional pressure, like:

1. 3 sentence Primary Business Objective statement - this is a succinct set of sentences that helps executives understand/get aligned on the solution presented relative to the "root cause"

2. 3 pillar Value slide - this is a pillar based representation of pain statements and desired outcomes each tied to business objective and is used to create some dimensionality to the previous Primary business objective.

3. From > To slide - If you're trying to create a sense of "pain: where we are" to "value: where we want to be" I recommend that you do a side by side slide that connects, very simply, the current state (1 sentence) and the desired state (1 sentence) PRO TIP: You want very few words on this slide, but lengthy, story telling context that you can elaborate on when presenting this slide later. PRO TIP #2: Best to reference customer stories here as well - bring these to life with real life examples.

4. Simplified Sales Process - Once you've tee'd everything up, you're now going to want to sell them on what they can expect in trade for their time. It's critical we make the process to getting into the desired state, easy. Or at least as easy as is reasonable