Top 5 Questions to Ask a Potential Customers about their Pain Points

It's common practice for us to meet a prospect and to spend time with them only to realize that they just didn't buy. This isn't productive and does not contribute to anyone's bottom line.

In actuality selling to people who can't or won't buy are a big dent to your sales productivity, budget and team. Top two-percenters need to spend time only with prospects who need your help, want your help, and are willing to work with you to solve their problems. The most important distinction that you need to make about your prospects include identifying that they have the authority and money to make those decisions. However, one particular item out trumps even those, and it is business pain. 

Examples of Business Pain Points

If your prospects say they are experiencing some employee dissatisfaction and retention issues that are impacting their productivity and hiring, customer churn is impacting their productivity and hiring. Pain is the first thing that top salespeople look for in their prospects.

1. Positioning Pain Points

what company doesn't need to acquire more or better business? What's holding their marketing and positioning efforts back. Here are some examples of what you might hear from psopects who have positioning pains.

• No one knows who our company is
• Our competitors are outspending us
• The market is changing / leaving us behind
• Until now we haven't considered digital marketing so we're behind

2. Productivity Pain Points

Is there something that is stopping a company and its employees from working efficiently and effectively? Your product or service might be able to help them solve these issues.

3. Financial Pain Points

Money is the biggest topic in business and is the hardest resources to acquire. There is often a lacking of it and the requirement to solve it is also very high. 

• We're not selling enough to keep the lights on
• Revenue is up but profitability is low
• We don't have enough visibility to know if we're making good financial decisions
• We may be overpaying for equipment and tools, but we don't know what to cut.

4. People Pain Points

People are the heart of every business, and often constitutes the largest expense but is also representative of the company's largest asset class.

• Employee morale is low
• We lose our best employees to higher-paying positions elsewhere
• Our lack of diversity leads to a lack of innovative ideas
• We can't trust our middle managers to train and motivate our employees

5. Process Pain Points

Operational problems also plague businesses on a day-to-day basis and your prospects know that the best way to achieve repeatable success is by implementing a repeatable process.

• Our hiring process is unwieldy and we struggle with finding highly qualified candidates
• Customer churn rate is high because our service department is inundated and can't keep up.
• We have no system in place to qualify leads
• There are inconsistencies in each employee's workflow which leads to disorganization and varying performance.

Conclusion

You're losing deals because you often are not addressing the prospect's very specific pain points. Identify these and you will be well on your way to delivering true value to your prospects and closing more sales.

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6 Questions That Will Identify Any Customer's Pain Points

There are many ways to qualify a prospect, however, there are some questions that perform better compared to others. If you want your sales team to be performing at the best of the capacities, 

here are the 8 questions that will help you to unearth some of the business pains which can generate better conversion rates.

1. What's your biggest inhibitor to company (or division) growth?

This cuts straight to the heart of the matter. Every company is in the business of growth so the biggest obstacle to growth is generally a serious pain. Many prospects don't really think about this and your question helps you build credibility and helps you to help your prospects to put this into the frame. Helping prospects talk through their current business situation can increase your understanding of the company while demonstrating your expertise.

• What's your plan to tackle X Pain
• When is your deadline to solve this problem?
• Do you think it'll be easy or hard to solve it?
• Who in your company is working to fixing this right now?

2. What is your biggest hairball?

This is a whimsical question. We like using this because it has personality, and is fun. More importantly, it'll stir up your prospect's emotion and get straight into their core needs.

This helps you make it more personal because you are asking your prospect how this pain actually affects them

3. What doe your boss obsess about?

You won't always be talking directly with the decision-maker more often than not you'll be speaking to someone 2 or 3 levels directly under them

• They usually control the budget for buying decisions.
• A manager's pain usually filters down to her direct reports
• It signals inexperience

4. What takes up the most time in your day

This is another angle to approach business pain that focuses on your point of contact. Salespeople hear over and over again that buyers care more about value than features, and this question reveals the concrete value of your product that could be useful and helpful to your prospects on a personal level.

5. What's been repeatedly discussed at standup or all-company meetings by senior management?

As mentioned above, business pain isn't two employees complaining there isn't enough coffee in the break room, and it's not something that can be fixed easily. This is the pain that keeps business owners up at night.

6. Why are you not closing deals?

Asking this question might uncover positioning pains, process pains or productivity pains in one of a company's most important departments: the sales department. If you can position your product or service as something that enables sales or marketing teams to acquire more business, you can win over those bottom-line-focused decision-makers.

Conclusion

These questions can give you really good insight into how your prospect's business' operates and what challenges they may be facing, and what kinks in the chain may be prohibiting the growth which they desire. Information about any one of these can open up opportunities for you to close more deals and deliver a chance for you to show how and what solutions your expertise can help to solve.

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Top 3 Tips for Addressing Business Pain

Once you identify the pain of your prospect you can determine what are the best ways to solve it for your prospect. This is an incredible tool to leverage on as a salesperson because the minute you can become solution-provider rather than a product-seller your customers will value your service more and closing sales will be very much easier.

Here are the top 3 tips you can implement today to address any of your prospect's business pain.

1. Use your prospect's body language and language when talking and communicating about their pain.

This is a secret technique that can go a long way in building trust with your prospect. Instead of trying to appear impressive by relying on jargon only your colleagues would understand, show your prospect you can take them seriously by using their language and terminology.

2. Find out who's empowered to solve the pain.

Find the economic buyer as quickly as possible. Ask your prospect which budget this purchase would be coming out from and what teams and investments would be needed to be involved in the buying decision. There's little point in spending hours with a person who can't ink a deal.

3. Identify additional key stakeholders as early as possible.

If you're selling to multiple teams and one team has completely differing ideas and priorities than the other you need to know this early so you can mitigate and make the necessary arrangements. Prospects are sometimes worried when they appear less authoritative so the best way to avoid that and to solve this is by asking the following questions:

• Who besides yourself needs to be involved in this decision?
• Who else would want to know that we have had this conversation?

Conclusion

Affirm your prospect's involvement while asking for information and it'll be easier to make your pitch meets everybody's requirements.

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5 Differences Between a Solopreneur vs Entrepreneur

If you work independently and have a great business idea while seeing it through from concept to execution? If you have answered yes to these questions and dream of being your own boss, you may enjoy working as a solopreneur.

Solopreneur job examples include:

1. Freelance writer
2. Virtual assistant
3. Accountant
4. Social media manager
5. Graphic designer
6. Consultant

Career opportunities for solopreneurs are on the rise. Many independent works report feeling fulfilled working solo than they did working for traditional companies. Also, they feel secure working independently as they would in a traditional job. With high job satisfaction and increasing opportunity for independent workers, embarking on a career as a solopreneur is a sought-after flexibility for those who want to create and operate a business around their lifestyle.

However, there is still some confusion between the difference between a solopreneur vs. entrepreneur.

5 differences between Solopreneur vs. Entrepreneur

We will be discussing further on solopreneur if you're wondering how being a solopreneur differs from traditional entrepreneurship. Basically, all solopreneurs are entrepreneurs but not all entrepreneurs are solopreneurs.

1. Solopreneurs are often both the founder and employee.

Someone who is a solopreneur manages every aspect of their business and does not heavily rely on delegating tasks to others to get things done. They are the founder and creator of their business and are solely responsible for producing and delivering the products or services offered to keep their business afloat.

2. Entrepreneurs often hire and manage a team

Separately many entrepreneurs start off running their business solo and eventually end up hiring and managing a team to carry out their business tasks.

3. Solopreneurs have a single business focus

Whoever chooses to pursue a career as a solopreneur are often not pursuing serial entrepreneurship. Solopreneurs tend to start their businesses to offer a specific niche offering and are focused on building a steady customer base.

4. Solopreneurs are not building a business to scale

For many entrepreneurs their goal in building their business to scale their company in an effort to sell or to build substantial profits. This is not the case for all entrepreneurs. For many independent workers, they are looking to create a profitable business they can continue to run, work in, and live off of themselves, and are not looking to grow an empire or to sell to another entity. In some cases, entrepreneurs.

5. Solopreneurs often have minimal workplace requirements

Because many solopreneurs offer a specific set of services that can be performed remotely, their workspace requirements tend to be minimal often only requiring a computer and an internet connection. Entrepreneurs on the other hand may have more complex workplace requirements depending on the nature of their business and size of their team.

Conclusion

As a business working together with solopreneurs vs. young startups have different merits and depend on your requirements and what you are comfortable to hire.

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5 Things Excel Can Solve For Your Small Business for Free

Microsoft Excel is versatile and is available on almost every computer device. Defined Excel is a business software and there's a lot of meaning to what it does. The versatility of the software is wide as there are many use cases and customised builds for different businesses. Here are some great ways for how excel can help your small business for free.

5 Ways You Can Solve Your Small Business Problems Using Excel for Free

1. Accounting

Excel can handle your company's entire accounts and is able to create balance sheets, financial statements, setting budgets, profit and loss statements, ledger entries, expense tracking, forecasting, loan calculation and more.

2. Inventory tracking

Excel can help businesses to track their inventory can keep track of physical items. Although there are complex systems and applications built specifically designed for a better equipped to handle inventory management, Excel is still a reliable, affordable option to facilitate the process. This is a greater option for startups to get off the ground quickly.

3. Compiling mailing and contact lists

Excel extends beyond number crunching as it shows a great way to store and maintain records of prospects' and customers' contact information. It has resources to manage and sort massive quantities of that kind of data for different kinds of projects, promotions or outreach efforts.

4. HR Management

Excel is an incredibly useful resource for HR managers. HR is a wide-reaching field that covers a broad, eclectic range of responsibilities. The people behind the human resources department have a lot to stay on top of. 

5. Time Logs

Excel can be used to track employees' hours is central to maintaining accountability at a company - for both management and employees alike. Excel can be an inexpensive, reliable way to ensure that the process is carried out consistently and properly.

Conclusion

There are a host of templates and models available for download online for free to help small businesses to conduct their day-to-day activities.

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