1. Suspend your judgement and be open to exploring
The first way to improve your ability to diagnose is to learn to suspend your judgement. Just because you have seen the signs before and have been able to make an improvement for a client who shared these signs and symptoms, does not in any way suggest that what you have done before will work in this case.
It might work, and it might not. It might need minor changes and modifications, and it might need to be scrapped for a whole new solution. You must be open to exploring.
To really perform a great diagnosis, you need to be able to stop yourself from the tendency to draw analogies from one set of circumstances to another long enough to make sure you really understand the root cause.
The symptoms and the signs, the causes of the dissatisfaction, may be the same, while having very different root causes.
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2. Remember that you are not treating an individual
In sales, we tend to talk about our clients by using their company name. It is almost like that company is an individual entity. And in some ways, it is. But a company is really a staggeringly complex number of parts and systems that are all interrelated. Problems in one area have a way of spilling over into other areas. That is why an excellent diagnosis considers the effect of the solution on the whole.
The dissatisfaction in an organisation can be found, the symptoms identified, and the root causes discovered. But this doesn’t mean that the diagnosis is over and that it is time to present solutions. To be really great at diagnosis, you have to understand how your solution will impact the rest of the organisation. When you make a change here, what happens over there? You need to be aware that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Like gravity, the law of unintended consequences is a hard law to break.
A doctor who did a poor diagnosis once prescribed me an anti-convulsant drug. One of the primary side effects of the drug was that it caused kidney stones, and it was recommended that the drug not be given to patients who had a history of kidney stones. A familiarity with the side effects and a single question would have revealed that I had had a kidney stone removed in the past. Fortunately, I read the accompanying documentation.
Make sure your diagnosis extends to all parts of the organisation before prescribing your solutions. Make sure you understand how what you provide will impact other areas of the organisation and make the adjustments necessary to ensure that you don’t improve something at the cost of something else.
This means taking time to understand. It means postponing your desire to sell your solution. It means being professional. Remember that you are not treating a single entity. You are treating a complex array of interconnected systems.
3. Build a diagnostic tool
You can build a diagnostic tool of your own. Make a list of the questions you need to ask to identify the symptoms and get to the cause. Your questions need to confirm what you can visibly see and measure as the symptoms, but also what the root cause is of the symptoms. For example:
- Profit margins are down
- Customer service scores are too low
- Client churn is too high
- Shipping times are too long
All of these are simply symptoms.
To discover the root causes you have to continually track down the “Why?” And you have to keeping asking why, following the path wherever it leads you. Why are profit margins down? When did profit margins drop? What is causing them to be lower than you need them to be? What caused that change?
To do this work, you have to be a good detective, following the trail of evidence, asking the question ‘Why?’
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If you have been in sales for any time at all, you have surely followed this path to discover that the root cause was something other than what you had originally believed. If you have been at this game a long time and you are completely honest, you can recall times when you discovered that you didn’t really know what the root cause was until after you installed your solution.
Make sure your questions don’t simply confirm that your solutions will work. Ask questions that confirm all of the areas where and why your solution may be wrong. This may help you prevent unintended consequences.
Make a list of the questions you need to ask to discover the root causes. Include questions to confirm that by providing a solution that improves the root cause, you improve the root cause and the symptoms.
Questions like: “So if we were able to improve this, would it automatically improve profit margins?
Be slow to judge
You may have the right solution in mind. Your first assumption may be correct. But doing a great diagnosis requires you to develop the ability to suspend judgement until you fully understand what it is you are seeing and what it means. It means taking time to notice the distinctions and the nuances that differentiate two root causes that coincidentally share symptoms, and only determining the best way forward after having done so.
