Mistake #16: I stopped at "better customer experience."
When I asked a buyer what he wanted, I got 1 of 2 answers.
"Better customer experience."
Or "more sales."
I wrote it down and moved on to the demo.
"Better" went on the proposal, and "better" is what every other vendor promised too.
I took the first answer as the destination.
Here's what I missed:
"Better" is a direction. The dream has a number in it.
The buyer is not hiding the dream from you.
Nobody has asked him to describe it.
And to buy in, he needs to see it so clearly he can smell it, feel it and hear it.
So you don’t write “better CX” on the offer and call it a day. Every goose with a landing page is promising that.
You’d dig:
What kind of experience? How is it delivered?
How many customers? How many products?
How would the customer journey look like?
How would the team experience or operation look like?
What would that mean for the business?
What would stop happening?
How would we know it worked?
Then you get something useful!
This is not just sales call prep.
The dream outcome becomes the language for everything.
It tells marketing what to say, sales what to ask, and product what result to deliver.
If you stop at “better customer experience,” your homepage says what every vendor says. Your demo sounds generic. Your proposal promises a direction instead of a destination.
When you define the dream clearly, the whole company can sell the same future.
This is how you build it.
Solution: 4 questions, in this order. Each one fills 1 line of the sentence.
Desired outcome: What does he say he wants?
Take the vague answer as the starting point, in his words.
"I want better order tracking."
Outcome meaning: What would that mean for the business?
"We would be proactive, exceed our customers' expectations, and drive more loyalty and engagement."
Without: What would stop happening?
"Customers would feel informed without support needing to step in, and we would have less bad reviews and chargebacks. We look disorganised and customers don’t trust us after they buy."
Success metric: How would we measure it?
"Fewer support tickets about tracking, more tracking page visits, higher CSAT after delivery, more $ upsells."
Why it matters:
That sentence does 3 jobs.
It sharpens marketing: your content, sales page, ads and outreach stop sounding generic.
It creates alignment in sales: read it back and ask, “Is this the future you actually want?”
It focuses delivery: now everyone knows what result the customer actually bought.
A rep can't pull this out of a buyer on the spot.
So before the call, pull from their reality: sales calls, client calls, DMs, emails, comments, objections, the things people talk about repeatedly.
List at least 15 desired outcomes, written exactly how they would say them.
Look for the logical statements and the emotional ones: what would it mean to them?
Then the rep walks in already fluent in the buyer’s language, and can help them sharpen the destination faster.
He guides the buyer through the 4 questions instead of guessing.
Ask the customer, of course.
But walk in knowing his language and his metrics.
So if you want to do this yourself, build the list of 15 first.
Then take your last buyer's first answer and run it through the 4 questions.
Done when the sentence has a metric, and he says, "Yes, that's the future."
Secret Sauce: What they say they want is the direction, not the destination.
Dig 4 questions deeper.
Best,
Virgil
PS: Mistake #17: I accepted vague answers and moved on.