Want More B2B Growth? Find Better Problems

For years, I have promoted the growth mindset, particularly the belief that our abilities can develop through learning, effort and experience. At the Entrepreneurs Summit in Melbourne, I encountered a perspective that challenged that view.

A fixed mindset can lead us to avoid challenges because they expose limitations. A growth mindset encourages us to engage with challenges because they develop our capabilities. An entrepreneur’s mindset goes further by actively seeking problems worth solving, because those problems can reveal unmet needs, create value, and ultimately become opportunities for growth.

Growth and fixed mindsets

The concepts of fixed and growth mindsets originate in the work of Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck.

• A fixed mindset assumes that qualities such as intelligence and ability are relatively fixed, which can influence how we respond when those capabilities are challenged. If we believe our abilities are fixed, difficult problems may feel threatening because failure exposes our limits.
• A growth mindset shifts this perspective with problems becoming opportunities to learn, practice, experiment, seek feedback and build new capabilities. This is especially valuable in entrepreneurship, where markets shift, strategies fail, and customer behaviour often defies expectations.

Entrepreneur’s mindset: problems can reveal opportunities

Entrepreneurs notice friction: inefficient processes, unnecessary costs, delays, poor experiences, and workarounds. They then ask who experiences the problem, how often it occurs, how important it is and whether a different solution could create enough value to change behaviour.

The MIT Sloan School of Management describes the entrepreneurial mindset as recognising and acting on opportunities, making decisions with limited information and staying adaptable and resilient in uncertainty. The entrepreneur’s task is to identify problems that are significant, frequent and valuable enough to solve. The goal is not just to profit from a problem, but to create value by solving it more effectively.

What this means for B2B product, sales and marketing

Many leaders make the mistake of starting with a solution and then looking for somewhere to apply it. This is currently the case with AI that I explored in the article Beyond AI Adoption: Choosing the Right Problems to Solve.  

The stronger approach is to start with the problem. B2B product, sales and marketing teams need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset and shift their focus from what they want to sell to instead focus on the problems their customers are actively trying to solve.

• For product, it means researching customer problems, identifying patterns and prioritising the problems that are significant, frequent and valuable enough to solve.
• For marketing, it should guide positioning, content and campaign strategy. Stronger propositions are grounded in meaningful customer problems rather than product features.
• For sales, it means understanding the significance, frequency and commercial impact of the problem before proposing a solution, improving both discovery and relevance.

How to find better problems

Finding better problems starts with listening to customers rather than assuming we already understand them. At Human Digital, we use customer research to uncover the needs, frustrations, behaviours and workarounds that are not always visible in sales data or marketing reports. We then bring sales, marketing and product teams together in facilitated workshops to turn those insights into opportunities to improve the customer experience, proposition, communications and ultimately the product or service itself. The objective is to create a shared understanding of the problems that matter most to customers, then decide which are worth solving.