If your ideal buyers already know their problem, why haven’t they been able to solve it?

In her book, The Red Thread, the amazing Tamsen Webster asks this important question. A question that’s worth spending an extra minute on. 

If your ideal buyers already know about their problem, why haven’t they solved it yet? 

Makes logical sense, doesn’t it? If someone is completely aware of the problem, they should be able to solve it. Because if you knew the problem completely, you’d know the solution as well. (At least in simpler scenarios.)

And yet our ideal buyers struggle. There is an invisible barrier that they can’t quite see clearly yet, that is preventing them from reaching their goal. Merely communicating the problem and then suggesting a solution would probably not prompt them towards the right direction.

A simple example would be –

“Hey, are you struggling with weight loss? We help you lose weight through customized nutrition plans.”

Yeah, thanks, Sherlock. I never knew that. (Eye-roll)

So what do we do?

We reframe the problem

We package the problem in a way that makes the ideal buyers go “Ohhh! I never thought about my problem that way!” Re-framing the problem essentially means presenting it in a way that highlights a previously overlooked aspect of the problem. 

How do we reframe the problem?

There are a few ways to do this. In her book, Tamsen suggests dividing the problem into two parts – the obvious part (the part that ideal buyers already know) and the non-obvious part (the part that ideal buyers don’t see).

It works great. But I think about it a little differently.

The root belief, a.k.a. the villain

When I work with my clients on their Big Idea, villain is the penultimate step. In the villain stage, we identify the root belief that is holding back my client’s ideal buyers. For example, one of my clients helps Founders and CEOs deal with stress. 

The counter-intuitive part here is that my client firmly believes that stress makes the journey worthwhile. As we dug deeper, we realized that the villain here wasn’t the stress. It was the belief that stress needs to go away. 

When we sought initial feedback on the idea, we realized it was landing. It was making the ideal buyers go, “Whoa, that makes sense.” They had not thought about the problem that way. The problem was reframed. 

This wins their trust

When we give such moments to our ideal buyers, when everything ‘clicks’ into place, they trust us more. In that moment of elation, their hearts have now opened to what we have to say. 

To summarize

Merely conveying the problem to your ideal buyers and following up with a solution doesn’t help with their trust. We need to give them an aha-moment. A moment where they start looking at the problem differently. Because if they knew about the problem, they would have solved it.