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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The Ultimate Step by Step Email Marketing Guide (for SMEs)

Email marketing is still the most effective channel to direct your digital marketing efforts. It's direct and effective with lead nurturing and is one of the highest converting marketing channels. Mailchimp covers some great industry statistics on email marketing here.

The biggest benefit of investing in an email marketing funnel is the ability for you to sell once but to many. In this guide, we'll take you step by step in setting up your email marketing funnel so that you can acquire leads and generate sales.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a strategy which uses email as a way to promote your products and services to prospective customers or to keep in touch with purchasing customers. 

Email marketing keeps the conversation going as converted customers are consistently kept in touch with key marketing topics to nurture and drive interest in your business.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is for you if you have the intention to implement email marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy. Also, this guide is for you if you intend to learn about the time and effort required as you plan to implement an email marketing strategy.

Disclaimer

This guide is long and detailed. You'll walk away with results if you implement and consistently apply the teachings here. To ease your ability to reference, this guide is segmented according to different sections.

What you will gain from this guide?

1. How to build an email list full of targeted customers.
2. How to optimise your emails for the highest open rates and click-through rates (CTR).
3. How to automate the process of nurturing your leads and turning your prospects into customers.

Why choose Email Marketing?

Despite the rise of social media and the negative connotation with email and spam. Email still remains the most effective way to nurture leads and to turn them into customers.

Why Email is great for Sales?

1. Email is still the world's #1 communication channel. 
2. You own your customer database. Your Social Media Platform can be suspended at any time without notice.
3. Email converts better. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers.

How to Start?

Although email marketing may seem complicated, in essence, but it just covers a few major sections which can be easily broken down into 2 major sections.

1. Start with your list. 
2. Add an email service provider.

How to grow your email list?

Growing your list does generally involve an opt-in form on your website. However, just placing an opt-in form on your website and hoping for people to sign-up is a strategy that is sure to fail.

To entice people to sign-up for your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. This can be done through a Lead Magnet. A Lead Magnet is something free that you give away in exchange for someone's email address. Some common examples of Lead Magnets include PDFs, MP3 Audio files, or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost.

Some ideas of Lead Magnets are:

• eBooks
• Cheat Sheet with Tips and/or Resources
• White Papers or Case Studies
• A Webinar
• Free Trials or Samples
• A Free Quote or Consultation
• Quizzes or a Self-Assessment
• A Coupon

How to create an Opt-in Form which converts?

An opt-in form isn't just any boring old form. Its main purpose is to convey the big benefit of your Lead Magnet.

Here's how you can create an opt-in form which converts:

1. Enticing Headline: Make sure your headline is attractive and clearly describes the big benefit of your Lead Magnet. 
2. Write a helpful description: A short and brief description is clear and to the point. Use bullet points to help the reader's eye quickly scan what they will get.
3. Attractive visuals.
4. Construct a simple opt-in form.
5. An easy to understand button.

Some places where you can place your opt-in form for maximum results are:

• Floating bar
• Your website's header
• Blog archive page
• Within your blog posts
• Your sidebar
• In a scroll box
• Your footer
• Your about page
• Resource Pages
• Email Signature

Choosing an Email Marketing Service

To email anyone you need their permission. If you started with an opt-in, usually this includes a permission intent. This is what makes opt-in email marketing great. 

OptinMonster

Constant Contact

sendinblue

Drip

AWeber

ConvertKit

Mailchimp

Personalise your marketing with Email List Segmentation

This is done by all marketing experts and is a process of identifying groups of your subscribers based on smaller interest or criteria for the purposes of sending them more personalised and relevant emails. For example, you wouldn't send father's day promotions to a teenager.

Segmenting your email list is proven to increase your email open rates, and decrease your unsubscribe rates. There are many ways to segment your email list into segments, and to get you started here are a few ways you can organise your segments for your email list:

• New subscribers: You can send a welcome email series
• Preferences: Based on what type of content they are interested to receive (eg.: marketing, promotions, etc.)
• Interests: Based on interests (eg.: pop music vs. rock music)
• Location: based on where your subscribers are located to share a local event happening near them.
• Open Rate: Reward customers who are more engaged with a special offer
• Inactivity: A reminder or a new promotion to entice further engagement.
• Lead Magnet: Send targeted emails depending on which Lead Magnet has attracted them.

Take time to spring clean your email list

It is important to email your subscribers on a consistent basis, so your list doesn't go stale. Even then, over time, email subscribers will go stale. This can be for various reasons but the most common reasons are a change of email accounts or they are generally not interested in your brand anymore. To keep your list fresh and active, it is advised to remove inactive subscribers periodically.

Write to Just One Person

When you draft your email subject line and message content, it's natural to think of the many thousands if not millions of people who are about to receive it. However, remember the recipient is only receiving an email from you. Thus, it is far more effective to write as though you are writing to one person with a highly personal subject line and a personalised message. To write this way you'll have to really know your buyer persona. You need to understand their problems, their desires, their values, their likes and their dislikes.

Inject some humour

Humour has a way of making a strong, instant connection with people. It's personal, entertaining and stands out in people's minds. It isn't really that hard, all you need to think outside the box.

Conclusion

You should absolutely be sending emails. Even if it is just an email newsletter. More than 83% of business-to-business marketers send email newsletters as part of their content marketing strategy. Email marketing is a very cost-effective way for brands to communicate with their customers and email is an essential piece in any marketing strategy.

Learn about professional email hosting here.

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8 Ways to Increase Website Traffic

With a global pandemic upon us all, it is even more essential for businesses to implement digital-first initiatives. There have been some great highlights during these difficult times, like restaurants and grocery businesses have led the way for online orders and distanced fulfilment. 

Yes, that means it is more important now than ever to have an online website that can allow you to receive, make and deliver your products or services to your customers.

A website is essentially space for your business on the Internet allowing visitors to learn more about your business and solutions which you can offer to them.

Having a website solves one-half of the puzzle of a digital-first initiative. The other more important half is focusing on obtaining a higher conversion rate.

Let's take a step back here. A higher conversion rate just means new visitors who are looking for your product or service which would be more likely to find your website first and for them to purchase what you have on offer.

You've likely heard that growing a website takes time. Requires consistent sharing of great content for months and months on end. And usually, it takes around 2 years of disciplined committed work for your website to get big.

It's slow. Not very thrilling.

This article isn't about to be boring. It'll cover some great ways to help your website gain spikes in traffic as and when you carry out any of the following suggestions. Read on.

Here's 8 ways you can increase your website traffic:

1. Make use of your email list

There are so many content marketing strategies available today, and it can be confusing. However, email marketing is the simplest, most cost-effective, and effective way to advertise your website.

As it is generally inexpensive email is more likely to drive a favourable ROI while being versatile. Create campaigns which encourage your email subscribers to share your content with their friends and family.

2. Build a presence on social media

Social media is the future. Don't take this lightly, as many businesses are already monetising from their social profiles. Social media worldwide is increasing at a rapid rate, and there hasn't been any sign of a slowdown yet.

Think outside the box. Don't just rely on Facebook. There are plenty of other alternatives such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Do more than just create a profile. Make sure you spend time to curate valuable and useful information or content that encourage engagement as these actions will make it much easier for you to generate new sales opportunities.

3. Start blogging

Make sure you create a blog and treat this as a priority because it doesn't matter what type of business you are in, blogging is one of the best ways to increase your website's traffic and generate new sales opportunities.

When you blog, you're taking steps to improve your SEO. As you continue to consistently add new content to your page, your SEO factor is improved. Yes, the success of this is directly related to the frequency of your posts. Stronger results came from more frequent blog posts.

4. Use influencer marketing to establish digital credibility

A website is only as credible as other people say it is. A fast way to hack this is to leverage your relationships with influencers. There are 2 ways to this (1) established celebrities (2) micro-influencers. 

5. Improve your backend infrastructure for more streamlined search engine optimisation

One of the key elements to discoverability on any search engine is website speed. Make sure you are with a reliable hosting partner to ensure your website loads fast, and is optimised for key target regions. You can find more information about this here.

6. Leverage long-tail SEO

You might have heard a big emphasis on including key search phrases in your SEO strategy. Who doesn't want to rank for terms like "web hosting" and "Kuala Lumpur's Best Web Hosting Company". Although those terms are lucrative they are also very difficult to rank for. Because of a large competitive base tussling for those keywords.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are much less competitive and could drive the majority of website traffic to your website.

7. Writing a high-quality guest post

One of the hottest and easiest ways to give your traffic a significant bump is to write a guest article for an already popular blog.

Here's how you can do this:

1. Establish and build a relationship with the blog's owner. 
2. Contact them via Twitter, and comment on their postings.
3. Leave high-quality comments on their website.
4. Get introduced by another guest writer.
5. Meet them face-to-face.

Here are some great tips for your guest post:

1. Use simple words
2. Write advanced how-to blog posts
3. Links
4. Create conversations
5. Prove you are the authority
6. Create powerful headlines

8. Create a giveaway worth wanting

There are many free giveaways, but very few take the time to craft a great giveaway that people actually want. Remember people are not signing up to your list because they like you, they're signing up because they believe you can help them with their problem. 

Conclusion

We get really excited just talking about all of these tactics because these are tactics that anybody can use, and some of the tactics that we also use. If you have any other findings that work for you do share them in the comments below.

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