Identify and get access to all stakeholders

Most organizations have a number of stakeholders. Here are some of the key questions to ask:

• Who is facing the problem?
• Who is making the decisions?
• Who is making the recommendation?

Once you have some of the answers to these questions, we should have a plan of action to get access to these people. These could be via a warm introduction or cold calls.

A key tool to help you with this is the organization structure. In private companies, most of the roles at the executive level are common across companies. You typically have a CEO, CTO, CMO, CFO etc. Government agencies also have a structure amongst them. Here is a link to how the Defense agencies structure themselves: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Defense_Agencies.png. In addition, while selling to defense agencies, it is helpful to look at the rank of the stakeholder. E.g. here: https://www.defense.gov/Resources/Insignia/. These charts help in understanding where the rank of the person you are connecting with and what they can realistically accomplish.

Get people to open up about their problems

This can be extremely hard.

• There might be a culture of not sharing information
• The interviewees might be explicitly not allowed to share information
• The interviewees might not be predisposed to talk about problems

The key here is to try to make people as comfortable as possible. This can be done by assuring interviewees that you don’t want any confidential information and primarily want their opinions on problems. It is also helpful to share that you are there to help and try to make things better.

Be open ended in what you are trying to learn

It is very tempting to focus on a specific line of questioning and discarding everything else. This sort of focus is something most people are taught in professional situations. However, this is not constructive while discovering complex problems. While the interviewee may not be able to articulate it, there might be a deeper problem to the issues they are facing. Sometimes it needs an external perspective and an open mind to identify those problems.

Learn about who else might have that problem and how they might be solving it

It’s rare that there is a problem which is specific to one entity and that no one else has solved it. It’s very likely that many other entities have a similar problem and might be solving it differently (albeit with different levels of efficiency). It’s critical to find as many people as possible who might be having a similar problem and learn from what they are doing.

Be persistent

It is very easy to have dead ends in this process. An interviewee might not show up. You may not get new leads. The cold calls may not respond. The list of dead ends can go on. It is critical to be optimistic and be persistent in this phase. While it is important to reflect on the root cause of a dead end, it’s critical to not let the dead end get you down and keep moving.