Finding Business Level Pain Execs will ACTUALLY Care About | Maddy Jackson | 30MPC Hall of Fame

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1. 2:56

   What's the impact of that challenge? What's your decision process? But challenging yourself to go a layer deeper makes it a lot easier for the prospect to think about these things and answer them in a way that you can then use later on in the deal cycle. A great line of questioning would be what challenge would you regret not solving six months from now? What are the ripple effects of that on the business? “Why does that problem matter to the greater business?” And then what steps do we need to take as a partnership to make it a confident yes or no decision? Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in.

   In Problem and outcome framing

2. 4:02

   when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at Outreach. Get it free in the show notes. Round us out, Maddie. What's number three? “The last one is a tactic I've been trying a lot this year, which is cold calling into” active pipe. So traditional cold calling can often be seen as trying to break into a new account and reach out to the right people and say the right thing to pique their interest. But later on in the sales cycle, I found it really helps accelerate the deal cycle in several ways. One example is cold calling end users to build a groundswell.

   In Calling

3. 5:20

   business impact. What questions are you asking before you ask impact questions? Good to start with situation and then process questions before you get to impact questions because you can craft your impact questions around what you've learned about the current “process. Situation questions show that you've done your research on the account, so a situation” question could be as simple as, Hi, Danielle, I saw that you're the chief marketing officer and you've been with this company for two years. You were previously at this company. Is that correct? Yes. You could even say, I saw that you guys are using our biggest competitor. How long have you

   In Account research

4. 12:01

   And so nine times out of 10, if I just asked that situational question, they would start complaining. The one time out of 10 where they wouldn't, they just assumed that that was what you had to do. And for the one out of 10, I would then educate them like you don't have to do all of that stuff. “But if you ask about a painful enough situation, whether it's updating a landing page or splitting a compensation spreadsheet into multiple small spreadsheets, that will naturally oftentimes get you to a problem.” And then it's your job from there to turn that problem into a more meaty business impact. The other thing I want to add that Maddie brought up and you brought up here, Armand, is both of you knew what you were looking for. You did not just show up on that call thinking, all right, I'm going to take this wherever I can and dig around and look for some problems that they might have.

   In Pain-point messaging

5. 14:21

   There are small problems in everybody's life that we choose to live with. And if they're not big enough, we won't make a change. How do you now turn this into, oh, this is hurting the business? How do you start to ask them about the impact here? Yeah, I think that you just really hit the nail on the head, “because where I would go from then is starting to craft a business case.” If they're not asking you directly for a business case, it's safe to assume that by the time you get to the CFO for sign off, it's going to be too late and you're going to have to backtrack and use these impact questions to build out that business case. I found that more often CFOs need to see a business case to trust that the people who have done the research

   In Economic value propositions

6. 32:37

   you need that landing page? That allows you to build a business case that's supported by both quantitative and qualitative impact. Number two is when somebody comes to you with one type of pain, oftentimes prospects know, hey, we need to solve this thing over here for our marketing team. “It's your responsibility to then also raise problems that other departments might be experiencing” to help you accelerate your deal and multi-thread, which will impact your win rates, deal pacing, et cetera. Number three, if you want to turn a situation into a problem, let's pretend someone is using WordPress as the competitor. You want to ask about a situation with that competitor that you know is painful.

   In Pain-point messaging

7. 32:58

   to help you accelerate your deal and multi-thread, which will impact your win rates, deal pacing, et cetera. Number three, if you want to turn a situation into a problem, let's pretend someone is using WordPress as the competitor. “You want to ask about a situation with that competitor that you know is painful.” You might ask, hey, how do you go about updating a landing page if you know that that is something that is painful with that competitor and that turns a situation into a problem? And then lastly, number four, if you are getting ghosted later in a deal cycle and you know who you need to get in front of as a next step, you can just email the person

   In Pain-point messaging