What business problems do you need to solve?
That’s the question Katie Robbert asked at B2B Forum in 2024. Hear how Katie defines her clients’ problems as a purpose, and how you can focus on your purpose to improve your business.
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Purpose is, “the problem we’re trying to solve,” at its simplest.
This is one of the hardest things for people to define:
What is the actual problem that you are trying to solve? What is the question you are trying to answer?
Some of the responses I’ve gotten in talking with clients:
“I want to replace my teams with AI.” Not a great purpose. Not actually getting to the root of the problem.
“I don’t want to fall behind.” This is not a purpose. This is an insecurity.
You need to look around and say, “is this actually something that we want to solve?”
“Everybody else is doing it.” Also, not a great reason to do it. It may not mean that you have to also do it, but this is a good motivator for a lot of people, “if everybody else is doing it, I must also need to do it too.”
“I want to win an innovation award.” This is something that I was told by one of my clients when we were discussing bringing generative AI into the organization. He said these exact words, “I want to win an innovation award.”
Okay, let’s dig a little deeper. Had he had any kind of self-awareness at all, he would’ve realized that it’s not an innovation award that he was trying to win.
His goal was to bring more members back into their app, back into their website, back into their products.
Their marketing was targeting the exact wrong audience. They’re skewing older, and their audience wanted to be younger.
So had he said, “actually, my purpose is I want to use AI to figure out how to tweak my marketing so that we can attract the right audience,” I would’ve said, “absolutely. That is something we can help you with.”
I can’t help you with this. I didn’t flat out refuse, but basically refused to help him with this because it was the wrong thing. So we had to dig a little bit deeper.
If anyone starts a sentence with, “I want to… with AI,” they’re already defining the wrong purpose.
So we need to figure out why.
We need to figure out what it is they’re actually trying to do, and this is the face I make when I ask them. I’m like, “why though?” (I can’t really make it. I can try.)
We can do better.
So think about the structure of your company. Even if you’re a solopreneur or you work at a large enterprise size company, you likely have some version of this structure. Sales, marketing, operations, and finance. Those are four major pillars.
It could just be you doing all of these things, or it could be spread out across a lot of different teams.
Each of these teams has problems that are solvable—problems that are maybe solvable with AI, maybe not.
But first, let’s dig into what those problems could look like.
Those are going to be a more clear purpose for you.
So if you look at your sales team, problems that they need to solve:
“I need to boost my revenue by X.”
“I need to increase net margin from 17 to 21%.”
“I need four more clients on my roster.”
“I need to increase our 3% closing rates.”
Those are excellent purpose statements—problems that you can solve—and then you can figure out where AI fits in.
So then, if you continue to go through…
Marketing:
“I need to know if my audience is the right one,” not, “I need to win an innovation award.”
“I need to diversify my customer base and enter an adjacent market.”
“I need to know what content to create.”
“I need to create thought leadership content to be seen as a leader in my market.”
“I need to know why my ads aren’t working.” That’s a good one.
“I need to know what’s working in my marketing, period.”
Operations:
“I need to know what’s going to happen so I can plan for it.”
“I can’t use my data to make decisions.”
And then finance:
“I know my company is underperforming, but I dunno how to fix it.”
“I need to cut costs across the board.”
“I’m paying too much for too many things that I’m not using.” Generative AI costs money. Just subscribing to a tool is going to add to this problem.
Notice that none of these problem statements ended with “with AI,” because we don’t know that that’s the solution.
It might be the solution. And you can use generative AI, believe it or not, to start to troubleshoot these things.
But when you’re talking about rolling it out to an organization as a whole, you want to make sure you’re doing it in a thoughtful and strategic way.
Published Feb 20, 2025
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