Building a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Prospect’s “Pain”

www.salesnexus.com

Craig Klein

Building a SuCCeSSfulMarKeting and SaleS

ProCeSS By identifying your ProSPeCt’S “Pain”

Business Growth ebook Series

http://www.salesnexus.com/

www.salesnexus.com Page ii

table of Contents

Business Growth eBook Series iii

Meet Your Hosts v

Featured Expert—Michael Halper vii

Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com ix

Building a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Prospect’s “Pain” 1

The 5-5-5 Content Marketing Strategy 2

Indentifying Your Prospect’s Pain 3

Why Pain is Tough to Find 12

Using Pain to Improve Emails 17

SalesScripter Web-Based Tool 18

Next Steps 23

www.salesnexus.com Page iii

Business growth eBook Series

We want you to grow your business. It is really that simple.

In fact, we surround ourselves with companies who share our belief that when we help you grow your busi-ness, everyone wins. We believe that when we help you grow your business, we also help grow communi-ties, families, employers and our customers.

We have created this series of eBooks—in conjunction with a webinar series—to help you expand opportu-nities for growth in your company. This is true even if you are not a SalesNexus customer…even if you use one of our competitors…we want to share what we have found to be useful for business growth.

Many businesses have great products and a great team, yet still struggle to master the strategies and tactics of connecting with their market, standing out from the competition and closing sales. Toward that goal, we have assembled a team of experts to share the best of what they know really works. Nothing is held back or saved only for those who are clients of our individual company. Each eBook is packed with practical steps any business can take immediately without busting the budget.

Below you will find a list of eBooks and webinars in this series. While each eBook builds on what was pre-sented in the eBooks earlier in the series, you can choose to take them in any order. However, we strongly suggest you read the first eBook or attend that webinar to get an understanding of how the information fits all together.

To Your Business Growth,Craig Klein, CEO SalesNexus

http://www.salesnexus.com/resources/webinars/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/the-magic-5-of-content-based-email-marketing-campaigns-that-drive-sales/

www.salesnexus.com Page iv

www.salesnexus.com

Craig Klein

THE MAGIC 5 OF CONTENT BASED EMAIL MARKETING

THAT DRIVES SALES

Business Growth ebook Series

The Magic 5 of Content Based Email Marketing that Drives Sales

Held on January 16h, 2013A simple 5 step process to create on-going, automated email cam-

paigns that engage your audience and identify highly qualified prospects.

How to Qualify Sales Leads and Focus on Sales Growth that’s Profitable

Held January 30th, 2013An in-depth look at how to use

simple questioning techniques to determine if a sales lead will purchase and the powerful impact of consistent qualifying.

360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth

Held on February 13th, 2013An in-depth look at how strong relationships between customers

and companies drive business growth and the risk of mistaking a customer to sales person relationship with a customer to company relationship.

Building a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Customer’s “Pain”

Held on January 23rd, 2013An in-depth investigation of how to

identify the emotional circumstances that cause custom-ers to buy from you, how to question prospects to diag-nose their “pains” and build sales processes that win!

Manage a Sales Process of Actions that Lead to Sales Growth

Held on February 6th, 2013An in-depth look at what should be measured in every sales pro-

cess, how to set goals for and measure it and how to manage sales people to achieve business growth.

The 4 Pillars of a Sales Messaging Strategy that Drives Growth

Held on February 20th, 2013How to communicate what your products and services do for your

customers, get their attention and understand their needs, with Michael Halper, author of “The Cold Calling Equation”

Business growth Series



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/how-to-qualify-sales-leads-and-focus-on-sales-growth-thats-profitable/



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/360-degree-view-of-the-customer-relationship-for-business-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/360-degree-view-of-the-customer-relationship-for-business-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/build-a-successful-marketing-and-sales-process/



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/manage-a-sales-process-of-actions-that-lead-to-sales-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/manage-a-sales-process-of-actions-that-lead-to-sales-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/4-pillars-of-sales-messaging/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/4-pillars-of-sales-messaging/

www.salesnexus.com Page v

Meet your Hosts

Craig Klein, CEO, SalesNexus.com

As CEO, Craig Klein leads a team that is on a mission to help your business grow. They accomplish this goal by providing an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that is fully integrated with an email marketing system. Klein brings 18 years sales executive and management experience to designing Sale-sNexus solutions.

SalesNexus is a different kind of CRM and email system for many reasons. Perhaps the most meaningful is the company recognizes that one size will not fit all in business. Since key people of the company come from a sales background, they know how to work with you to find unique solutions specific to you, your business and your customers.

Thousands of sales teams from around the world have discovered that SalesNexus takes the hard work out of selling. That way you can focus on the people part of serving your customers. They know that you enjoy sales because you enjoy people. SalesNexus will maximize the time you spend establishing deep relation-ships with your best customers.

This team feels success when they make marketing and selling easier for you. That is why SalesNexus is hosting this Business Growth series of webinars and eBooks

Don’t forget that SalesNexus offers a 30-day free trial of their program so you can try it out…look around…ask questions to determine if it is the right fit for you. During the free trial period, you can also download your choice of 500 business contacts—with email addresses—at no cost at all via LeadFerret.com. Learn more about LeadFerret below.

http://www.salesnexus.com/resources/webinars/

http://bit.ly/UVaT1j

www.salesnexus.com Page vi

Forrest Cassidy, CEO, LeadFerret.com

Lead Ferret is the world’s first 100% free business-to-business database with complete information. They offer more than 10 million easily searchable B2B contacts—with emails—FREE.

In today’s business environment, it is critical that you use your time in the most time efficient manner pos-sible. The objective of Lead Ferret is to make prospecting and generating leads easier for sales teams, re-cruiters, and small business owners.

The LeadFerret system allows you to spend less time prospecting and more time selling…and that leaves more time to do the things you really love to do.

Learn more about Lead Ferret on a following page.

Meet your HoStS

http://leadferret.com/

www.salesnexus.com Page vii

featured expert—Michael Halper

Michael Halper, CEO, SalesScripter, LLC

Driving improvement in sales organizations is the mission of everything that Michael Halper does profes-sionally. With more than 20 years in frontline sales, marketing and customer service, he brings innovative solutions to all his clients.

We are honored that Halper agreed to share his expertise with us as part of the Business Growth Series. Don’t miss any opportunity to learn from him. In addition to this series, here are a few ways you can get valuable nuggets of sales wisdom from Halper:

• “The Cold Calling Equation”: As author of this groundbreaking book, Halper shares powerful insights into the ‘blood sport’ of cold calling. Sales professionals always resist cold calls. Yet those who mas-ter the art of the cold call have always closed more deals and hit their goals. Cold calling success is NOT about working harder or working more. Instead, it is about using proven, step-by-step tactics to achieve immediate results. In addition, the book will help you make human connections and find more opportunities. Get the book here.

• SalesScripter.com: This web based tool is a complete game changer in the field of sales. SalesScripter assists your company in identifying the details you need to create powerful sales messaging. The tool will help develop your sales scripts, email templates, voicemail scripts, qualifying questions, objection responses and more. Try SalesScripter FREE!

• Launch Pad Solutions, LLC: Launch Pad is a training and consulting firm that helps businesses in-crease sales revenue by improving areas of sales prospecting and lead generation:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cold-Calling-Equation-Problem/dp/1468173545

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cold-Calling-Equation-Problem/dp/1468173545

http://salesscripter.com/

http://salesscripter.com/

http://www.coachingyou.org/

www.salesnexus.com Page viii

• Sales Consulting: Launch Pad works with management to establish sales messaging, processes, and strategy that lead to immediate improvements in results.

• Sales Training: Training programs that help frontline sales resources to improve their ability to effec-tively prospect. Sales resources are able to make immediate improvements due to the effective, yet practical and easy to implement, tactics.

• Sales Coaching: Launch Pad works with sales professionals and managers on a one-to-one basis to help ensure the right steps are being taken to improve sales prospecting and lead generation.

• Appointment Setting Service: For businesses that do not want to spend their valuable time on pros-pecting and working to generate leads, Launch Pad takes over that responsibility through an appoint-ment setting service. Under this model, Launch Pad’s team of telesales resources performs pros-pecting activities and schedule appointments for clients that have outsourced that functional area.

featured exPert—MiCHael HalPer

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-consulting-c-2.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-training-c-8.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-coaching-c-4.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-outsourcing-c-7.html

www.salesnexus.com Page ix

featured Sponsor—leadferret.com

Lead Ferret is a sales organization’s most powerful source of new business. Like it says on the Lead Ferret website, when you access this service—it is like adding 10 million+ con-tacts to your address book. The database contains complete information including email addresses…and so much more. It’s free to join, so go check it out.

Throughout this series, we will be showing you how to use this contact information and implement strategies for business growth in an efficient, time-saving and highly profes-sional manner.

If you are a SalesNexus user you can download 500 free contacts a month. You can even take advantage of this free offer during the free trial on SalesNexus.

Since some people say that, “2 minutes on LeadFerret is worth 2 hours on LinkedIn.”— you should take a few minutes to learn more.

Every record in LeadFerret is complete with company information, name, title, address and phone number. You can search by SIC and NACIS codes. You can search by location in several ways, including a map tool.



http://www.salesnexus.com/free-trial/

www.salesnexus.com Page x

The methods we are showing you in this series will demonstrate how to use this robust interface to grow your business. In the first eBook, you will learn how to identify your ideal prospect. You may have a geo-graphical territory or there may be a size of business that fits well with your product/service. You can search in terms of revenue range, industry, department within the company and the title of the individual you should contact.

You simply plug the demographic details into the LeadFerret system. You get a list of target prospects to download into SalesNexus. You have spent much less time finding the right type of person and can now spend more time connecting with high quality prospects and building relationships.

It all fits together with one purpose—to Grow Your Business.

featured SPonSor—leadferret.CoM

Building a SuCCeSSfulMarKeting and SaleS

ProCeSS By identifying your ProSPeCt’S “Pain”

www.salesnexus.com Page 2

Building a SuCCeSSful MarKeting and SaleS ProCeSS By identifying your ProSPeCt’S “Pain”

the 5-5-5 Content Marketing Strategy

First, let’s quickly review some of the material we covered in the first eBook in this series…“Magic Five of Content-Based Email Marketing That Drive Sales”.

• Identify five pain points experienced by your customer before they know about your solution.

○ You need to know these pains before you generate any content or emails.○ Pain points are initially more important—than how you can resolve them.

• Create content pieces for each of the pain points you have identified.

• Send an automated series of emails to prospects that link to the content pieces you created.

• Your email program should have a way to track when a prospect opens the email or clicks on a link to the content piece.

• Use the prospect’s interaction with the email as a signal for your sales team to follow up with a phone call.

• Instead of calling to try to sell your product or service, check in with the prospect to ask a few questions.

○ To make the call more productive for you and relevant for the prospect, you can focus on asking qualifying questions.

○ If your prospect is qualified and you are able to trigger interest, use the opportunity to schedule an appointment with the prospect.

• If you speak to a prospect but do not progress to an appointment or meeting, add the prospect to a second, more targeted email campaign of emails that answer Frequently Asked Questions.

○ These FAQs are based on your specific business. They are questions your prospects currently ask before they place and order for your product or service.



indentifying your Prospect’s Pain

In this eBook, we will drill down on understanding a prospect’s pain in a larger aspect than simply creating content pieces for your sales strategy. You will learn what pain is and why pain is an important focus for successful sales.

This second eBook in the series will:

• Outline three levels of pain• Talk about symptoms• Talk about why pain is hard to find• Give you some tactics to uncover pain• Talk about the impact of pain• Introduce a new online tool called the SalesScripter

When you adopt the information in this eBook, you should make better cold calls by incorporating the topic of pain in your messaging. You will also have better conversations with prospects. Ultimately using this informa-tion will cause you to generate more leads because of the better interactions. When you focus on pain…either identifying pain or identifying when pain doesn’t exist…you’ll be able to better qualify your prospects.

What is Pain?Basically, it means that something is not working well for your prospects. Your prospect is experiencing some sort of negative impact.

But it does not stop there. It could also be something that could be working better. That means that things may be working “ok”, but there could be a gap in terms of the desired level of performance.



At the most basic level, the real question is whether or not there’s pain. The question is:

• Are things great?• Are things good?• Are things ok?• Or could they be better?

If things are good or great, there might not be any pain. If things are ok or could be better, there is likely some underlying pain present for the prospect in the particular area you are discussing.

Why is Identifying Pain Important?How can identifying pain help you generate more leads?

First, if there is no pain, there is no reason to change. Let’s say you sell a piece of software. Your software is innovative. It has great features. It’s very cool. It demos really nicely. You could show it to a prospect. They could be very excited about what they see.

But if they’re currently using something today that is working well, even knowing they are excited about it, they may not buy your software. Because things are good and there’s no pain, they might not be able to justify spending money to switch over to what you have. It’s not a deal breaker. But those are the sales that are likely to stall out at the end. You have to work really hard to close because there’s no pain.

If you are trying to generate leads and schedule meetings…if there’s no pain, there’s no real reason to meet. Think about it a minute. The only time you go to the doctor is when something’s wrong. If your doctor’s of-fice called you and said, “Hey, do you want to come on in?” If everything’s great, you are going to say “No thanks. I don’t need to.” You know you have plenty of other things to do.



The same is true with your prospects. If you aren’t calling them and reaching out to them for a pain that you can resolve, they’re not going to be able to justify—or they’ll be less able to justify—spending time to meet with you.

You want to get the prospect’s attention. Center the messaging around pain that the prospect might have and it increases your ability to get their attention. It will also help you extract valuable information from the prospect. If you can identify what’s not working and where the pains are, you’ll have very valuable informa-tion that you can use throughout the sales cycle. The information can help you build your business case, build your proposal, build your ROI (Return on Investment) calculations and close deals.

Three Levels of PainTo help you get a better understanding—or to help you get your hands around what pain is and what it might look like—here are three levels of pain:

Technical Pain

The first level is the foundational level. You could think of it as the lowest level where pain starts to grow. We call this technical pain. Like we said in the first eBook, don’t get this confused with IT. It has nothing to do with technology.

Remember the Magic 5 Steps Covered in First eBook of This Series

Step #1—Identify Target Market

Step #2—Define Pain Points

Step #3—Create Content

Step #4—Create Qualifying Questions

Step #5—Develop FAQs

This eBook is to help you get clear about the role of your prospect’s pain in the lead generation strategy we call “The Magic 5”.

Remember that we use the prospects pain to create our content pieces that are

sent out by automated email. We want you to understand what pain is so you can

identify the pain resolved for your pros-pects with your product or service.



This is the area of processes, systems or people (such as employees). It could be technology and a lot of times it is based on technology, but it doesn’t have to be.

Let’s use an example using employees and processes. If it takes you two months to get a new employee on board and up and running, it may be longer than what is typical for that type of position. That causes a tre-mendous amount of pain. That is technical pain. It’s process driven. It’s dealing with your employees.

Here are some examples:

• Slow or broken manual processes. They are either causes or results of technical pain.• Poor system performance• Employee performance• Lack of reliability

These are areas where technical pain exists. When it begins to oc-cur, the pain will work its way up and create business pain.

Business Pain

When challenges and negative im-pacts start to occur in areas like revenue, costs, customers or de-livery of services, it becomes busi-ness pain.



Here are a few examples:

• Low revenue• Decreased market share• Close rate• High cost-to-goods-sold• High labor cost• High inventory or materials costs• Poor delivery of services

So, if we have a website that’s going down frequently, that’s a technical pain. The server may be unreliable and that causes business pain because it’s providing poor delivery of services. Current customers aren’t able to access their information. Prospects can’t get their orders. It is poor delivery of services and it causes a negative impact in the area of revenue.

It doesn’t stop there—unfortunately. When you feel business pain, it will continue to work its way up and typically impact your prospects in the area of personal pain.

Personal Pain

With the example we used above; let’s say your prospect is an IT Director or VP of IT. The servers are going down and causing technical pain. The technical pain causes business pain because the services are not able to be delivered.

What does that mean to the Director of IT? Quite honestly, if that’s happening under their watch it could affect their bonuses, compensation or ability to get promoted. If you’re VP of IT and having these problems, it could prevent you from being promoted to CIO.



So everything works its way up to impact your prospects at a personal level. Some of the personal areas are income, career and work environment. A common pain is too heavy a workload for your prospects …the work/life balance. They’re spending too much time working and not enough time at home with their family. Your product or service might be able to help with that.

6 Symptoms of PainUsing the analogy of a doctor—you go to the doctor’s office and they try to figure out if something’s wrong. They will look for cer-tain symptoms. How is your appetite? Are you able to sleep? They will ask the questions to find certain symptoms. The following are symptoms you can look for to increase sales.

Things are not working well

Let’s look at an example that is very common to most of us…own-ing and operating a vehicle. We will say that the vehicle is for the business purpose of making deliveries.

The symptom we will assume is that the vehicle is breaking down three or four times a year. We physically know that this pain occurs when we are stuck on the side of the road. The root cause of the pain is that sys-tems and processes are old and faulty in the vehicle. This causes a technical pain in the fact we can’t reach our destination to make deliveries.

The business pain is our revenue is negatively affected by our systems not working well that may cause us to not make deliveries and decreased customer satisfaction. Personal pain is when we are stuck on the side of the road, we have to work late and it takes away from time with our family.

6 Pain Symptoms

1. Things are not working well

2. Something could be working better

3. Processes are time consuming

4. Errors are being made

5. High costs



We’ve identified a symptom. Things aren’t working well. We then identified how this is impacting us at a technical, business and personal level. This is a fairly academic, simplified example. But it helps you under-stand the ways your prospect could be impacted.

EXAMPLE: We talked about a company with a website going down earlier. This is an example of the pain symptom of things not working well.

Something could be working better

Using the vehicle as an example again…let’s say that our vehicle starts like a charm every day and never breaks down. It’s extremely reliable. However, it only goes 45 mph at top speed. We are out on the road and driving very slowly. We are not able to go as fast or as far as you would like. How is this affecting us?

From a business standpoint, we cannot complete as many deliveries per day because it takes more time. That situation impacts us from a revenue standpoint. At a personal level, compensation will be less. Our bonus could be tied to the number of deliveries per day, per week, etc. Maybe we get tips. We are negatively impacted by this pain.

The important thing at this level is to recognize that things are working. The prospect has performance and reliability, but the overall performance could be better.

EXAMPLE: In the business environment, say your prospect is a manufacturer. The manufacturing line works perfectly. It never goes down, but it only spits out 100 units per hour. Suppose it was possible to upgrade the systems and get 250 units per hour.

In this sample, things are working ok, but they could be working better. What additional revenue could be made if things worked better?



Processes are time consuming

When the current process is time consuming, it can mean that a manual process uses two people to oper-ate a piece of equipment, when an upgrade could cut payroll expenses. An example would be the old style garbage truck that took a driver and two laborers to collect the garbage. When the process is switched to specialized garbage bins and a truck that is equipped with a lift that can be used by the driver, significant cost savings can be realized. All three levels of pain can be reduced.

EXAMPLE: The same is true in the business world. If you sell products or services that help improve the level of automation, the processes are much less time consuming. The automation resolves pain for your prospect.

Errors are being made

Using a vehicle as an example again…say the speedometer is not operating correctly. If the prospect looks at the speedometer and sees the wrong speed we have a number of errors that could happen. It could cause the driver to go too fast and get a speeding ticket or get into an accident. We might drive too slow and cause an accident too. With incorrect information, errors will be made.

The technical pain is the driver cannot correctly operate the vehicle. The business pain is the potential for traffic violations or accidents. The personal pain is the risk of actually getting hurt in an accident.

EXAMPLE: In the business world, your prospect may rely on information. Errors can be made in the processes or in the information. The faulty information impacts the business ability to manage things and make decisions. If they are not able to make the correct decisions, they might be fined.

This is particularly true in regulated industries like financial institutions. They need to stay in very strict compliance. With incorrect information they can easily make a wrong decision. Even with their integrity



exactly in the right place, they can get fined by the SEC hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can be the result of incorrect information.

High costs

Just about all prospects experience high costs. Using a vehicle as an example again, let’s say the vehicle is not fuel efficient. The root cause could be a vehicle that is simply inefficient, or there might be a fuel leak. It causes technical pain when more frequent stops are made to refuel. It decreases productivity. Every time the vehicle must stop to refuel, it is taking away from the ability to complete deliveries.

The business pain is the additional expense for fuel. It affects both productivity and profitability. On the personal level, the inefficient vehicle can impact bonuses and other compensation.

EXAMPLE: There are many different ways a business might have a pain of high costs. A business could not be using tools to effectively manage planning and oversight of projects. Without the abil-ity to see what happening, a project can run over in both time and budget. This type of environment causes pain symptoms of high costs.

Low revenueProbably every prospect wants more revenue. You can think of a number of reasons that your clients don’t have the revenue they want.

EXAMPLE: A business may have decent revenue from existing clients, yet struggle to secure new clients. This is a common example of the pain symptom of low revenue.



Why Pain is tough to find

Unfortunately, it can be challenging to get a prospect to admit to their pain due to a couple of very reason-able factors.

State of Denial

When you are meeting with a prospect, they may claim that things are fine, when they are really not. We see this in sports. A football player could get hit and the coach asks how he feels. The football player says, “I feel fine. Put me back in coach.” Even though the player hurts, he just wants to get back in the game. That is what prospects can do when you reach them on a cold call. Even though you may ask fairly good questions, they may deny the pain anyway.

In business, a prospect may just want the prospecting call or meeting to end. They will not admit to any pain so they can get back to work—get back in the game. This scenario is the prospect being in a state of denial.

Latent Pain

More commonly, the prospect denies having pain because they are not aware it exists. What you can do is bring the pain to the forefront of the prospect’s mind by asking really good questions.

When we covered the six scenarios earlier and talked about six different problems with real pain symptoms, just about all of the symptoms could be occurring without being known.

• They could be using manual processes without knowledge of available automation.• They may not be aware of errors that are being made.• They can lack awareness of high costs or low revenue



When your prospect is unaware of pain existing, it is called latent pain. The key to bringing awareness of pain to the prospect is asking good questions.

4 Tactics to Uncover PainWe are giving you four tactics you can use to help uncover the pain. They are really easy to implement and it is possible to produce immediate results. If you deploy these tactics across a number of calls, you should see an immediate improvement in your results.

Rating Questions

It is very common to ask questions like, “How are things going with your current service provider?” It is easy for the prospect to answer with something like, “Pretty good.” That answer does not tell you anything about the pain they may be experiencing.

Change the question to “How happy are you with the level of service from your current provider on a scale of 1 to 10?” They may answer that it is about a 7.5. You have learned that things are not perfect, even though the answer may have been “Pretty good” with the other question. The next question can be “Oh, it sounds like you are doing all right. Can I ask you a real quick question? You say 7.5. Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why you give that rating in place of a 10? What could it take to get you to increase that?”

You now have a way to identify the gap. It is usually in the gap where you find some sort of pain. They might say that the pricing is a little too high, or their support isn’t really good. The rating question allows you to open the conversation to learn what is happening. It is real simple to do.



Give Pain Examples

When you give pain examples, you are trying to poke the coals on the prospect and get them to identify that they might have some pain.

EXAMPLE: “So, Mrs. Prospect, we work a lot with businesses that say it’s time consuming and dif-ficult to run a global report. Is that something you can relate to?”

It’s a good idea to use three examples, like this: “You know, when we talk with prospects, they often express challenges with running global reports, reconciling the different invoices and spending a lot of time on the weekends balancing the books. Are any of these challenges you can relate to?” If they answer that all of these areas are fine, you can go back with more pain examples or simply decide that this prospect isn’t a good fit.

Wish List Questions

Ask the prospect if they could wave a magic wand and have any functionality added to their current system, what would they add? Typically the answer leads to some kind of pain. They might answer, “Oh, I wish that I had an ability to differentiate these users from these users.” You can follow with inquiries about why they currently have it this way or why do they need to be able to see those two different audiences. You can drill in and get the conversation going.

Disqualify

This last tactic is used primarily as the last resort. When the prospect seems to be not sharing any pain, you can ask questions that disqualify the prospect. For example, if you say, “Well, it sounds like you all are doing pretty well.” the prospect will respond in one of two ways.



Either they will agree and you can be assured that they do not have pain. Or the prospect will pursue you for more informa-tion. Doubting whether the prospect needed help has given you an opportunity to uncover areas where you can help them.

Identify the ImpactEven when you have identified the pain, you need to dig deeper and know the impact of that pain. If we use the story in the paragraph “Give Pain Examples” above, the prospect may have told us that they can’t run global reports. Do you know what that means? If you assume that you know, you might not be making decisions based on the best information.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say a patient goes to the doctor with some s knee pain. If the doctor assumes that he knows the impact of the pain, it is an assumption that may not fit the real pain. The knee pain may be causing him to not be able to work out or spend time with his kids. These are huge impacts to him. The pain is causing such a negative ripple through his life from both a health and happiness standpoint. Because the impact is significant, the patient is able to justify the surgery. The impact is extremely great. If the doctor didn’t ask the patient how the pain is affecting him, they wouldn’t know what treatment is needed.

But let’s look at it from the other side. If the doctor said: “Well, you have this pain. It’s causing you some problems. How is it impacting you from a day-to-day perspective?” The patient may answer, “You know, it’s no big deal. It hurts a little bit in the morning, but I get loosened up.”



When the doctor realizes that the impact is not very much, he knows that the patient is not qualified for surgery. The pain by itself is only half the story. Knowing the impact on your prospects at a technical level, business level and personal level is important. When you uncover that, it’s where you really begin to get some powerful information.

Not only do you get good information, when the prospect begins to tell the impact of the pain, it also makes them more aware and they feel the pain. When they feel pain, it makes them want to fix the problem.

Revealing the impact either magnifies or minimizes the pain. When it is magnified, it becomes bigger…which is a good thing. It is going to help you build your business case. You could also minimize the pain. That sounds like a bad thing, but it can also be a productive outcome. If you identify the pain impact as marginal, it disqualifies the prospect.

If the impact is not that large, you will not spend the time and energy to put this prospect in your pipeline. Your manager will not expect you to close this low quality lead. You will be better able to manage your pipe-line and forecasts. Most important, you will avoid wasting time on a lead that is not likely to close. Minimiz-ing pain to disqualify a prospect is good.



using Pain to improve emails

We have been talking about uncovering the prospect’s pain because we are going to use this information to improve our emails. It is important to be clear on the pain you resolve with your product or service. You build your content pieces around each pain.

EXAMPLE: If the company has a pain of not being able to generate leads, the content piece could have the title “Three Ways to Generate More Leads.” Once the content piece has been created, you can send an email that has a small portion of the copy in it. You might use the subject line, “Are you struggling to generate leads?” If someone has that pain, this subject line should get their attention.

This approach is so much more effective than sending an email that tells of your latest and greatest new feature. The email that hits their pain is much more likely to be read. You want to send the email through your CRM, or any system that allows you to track opens and clicks. When a prospect clicks on the link to your content piece, you will know they have some interest. They are self-qualifying themselves for possibly needing what you offer.



SalesScripter Web-Based tool

This eBook has covered how to find your prospect’s pain. The other half of the equation is being fully aware of the pain your products and services resolve. You are probably aware of two or three pains to uncover when you talk to prospects. But do you have a full list of all the pains you can resolve with your product/service? A complete list can drive a lot of the qualifying questions we cover in the third eBook in this series called, “How to Qualify Sales Leads and Focus on Sales Growth that’s Profitable”.

SalesScripter is a web-based sales tool that helps you identify all the pain points your products/services resolve. It takes you through a series of questions that extract the key details about your products. You will uncover how they help and the challenges they resolve. All of the data is populated into an extensive library of sales scripts, templates and tools.



One of the tools is a list of pain points you resolve. You can use that list when talking to prospects. You can use the tactic of sharing pain examples to uncover prospect pain. Other items in the SalesScripter are:

• Elevator pitch and value statements• Cold call scripts• Responses to objections• Voicemail scripts• Email templates• Sales presentation• Qualifying questions• Closing questions• And more….

By incorporating SalesScripter into your strategy, you will immediately improve the effectiveness of your sales team. It will lead to improved lead generation and sales results. If you are a sales manager, you will also see a decrease in sales staff turnover and all the costs associated with it.

Lead Generation and CRM Integration with SalesScripterAll the content generated by the SalesScripter can be loaded as a campaign into a CRM like SalesNexus. Next, use the results of the ‘ideal prospect discovery’ to pull a list of prospects from a resource like LeadFerret.

Online Tool Integration

1. Use SalesScripter as outlined above

2. Load scripts and emails into Sales Nexus

3. Pull prospects, based on ideal pros-pect description, from LeadFerret.

4. Click to deliver automated emails

5. Call those that open or click in email

6. Automate emails to respond to calls

7. Generate highly valuable leads with-out wasting time



Pre-Call Automation

After pulling the prospect data into the CRM (which already has the email campaign loaded), a simple click will send an email to start contacting the prospects you have downloaded from LeadFerret.

A few days after the email campaign is sent out, sales people start calling the ‘clicks’ first and then the ‘opens’ to use the scripts and schedule appointments.

If the first email does not uncover any interest, the second email goes out automatically because it is sched-uled in the CRM. Again, your sales staff will want to follow up with clicks and opens. For those that don’t respond to the first two emails, a third one will be sent—all without any additional work on your part. Spend time calling the prospects who have self-qualified (at least to a certain degree) by ‘raising their hand’ in response to your automated emails.

Post-Call Automation

Once you talk to someone, you can also set up email threads to respond to their specific need. For example, if the prospect says, “Send me your information”—you can have an email loaded into your CRM that starts with, “Thank you for taking time to speak with me. As I mentioned…” When you send that email, it triggers an automated sequence of emails to follow up. You may determine that the best time to make a call is be-tween emails two and three.

You can also set up an email thread for the times when you had to leave a voicemail. Of course, you want to make 5-10 attempts to reach them by phone. But these days, some prospects never answer the phone. You find that you must leave a voice mail. After you leave the message, the voice mail is supported with a thread of automated emails that are specific for these hard-to-reach prospects.



SalesScripter as a Selling SystemThe SalesScripter provides much more than scripts, emails and content pieces. Here are a few additional ways to make the tool work for you:

Improve Prospecting: Your sales team will know what to say and what to ask prospects. When making pros-pecting calls, responding to objections, leaving voicemails, sending emails, the scripter helps you. Asking the right questions and making the right statements, you can expect to see immediate improvement in the results of prospecting activities.

Improve New Hire Sales Training: Many sales training programs for new hires focus on product training. They may include some type of sales methodology for how to manage deals and opportunities. What is often missing is education about what to say when prospecting. They are not taught how to generate deals and opportunities. SalesScripter fills the gap to help optimize training of new sales people.

Presentation outline: The scripter will produce a sales presentation you can use early in the sales cycle. The report will outline your challenges that can be used for a PowerPoint presentation. Using the heading and bullet points to assemble your most important points about your products, company overview, how you differ, case studies, etc.

Topics for blog posts: Do you have a company blog that needs regular posts? The scripter will produce a list of content marketing topics based on your products, the value you offer and the pain that your product/service resolves.

Get around Objections: Objections will pop up in every prospecting conversation. Are you and your team prepared for the objections that you regularly face? Prepare for them by having responses read that will keep the conversation going. You will see immediate results.



Sales Management Tool: When new sales people get out in the field, they start making calls. At this point, many sales managers just hope that the sales person combines training with instinct to ask the right ques-tions and make the right statements. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy. Missteps are a common occur-rence until the sales person gets experience. Those missteps can be very costly in terms of lost business and sale staff turnover.

The SalesScripter eliminates the challenge by helping sales management give clear direction to new sales people. The scripter, coupled with the CRM to record results of these questions, allows the manager to be really helpful to the sales team.

Decrease Sales Staff Turnover: When sales people have more clarity about what to say, they will perform better. They will also be more comfortable and confident in the challenging world of prospecting. The two improvements combine to drive down sales turnover and all the costs involved.

Improve Lead Generation: A sales person will get more out of each interaction with a prospect by simply asking the right questions and saying the right statements. This leads to an improvement in lead production numbers.

Increase Revenue: With more leads and tools to decrease sales staff turnover, companies can expect im-provement in sales revenue long term.



next Steps

We hope that you’ve benefited from our ebook! We truly want to help you take your business to the next level. If you have questions about how these ideas can best be applied in your business, we’re only a phone call away! Really! Call or email and we’ll do our best to help however we can.

All the best,

Craig KleinCEO, SalesNexus.com713.862.0001

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