Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
In our Groove Friday Q & A segment, we’re answering any questions that you have about, well, anything.
A huge thank you to Adam Feber, Tejaswi Raghurama and Iulian Grigorescu for this week’s questions.
Check out this week’s answers below, and jump in with your own thoughts in the comments!
What’s the best way to say “no” to sales people?
I, too, get dozens of these emails every week, and a long time ago, I came to the same conclusion as you did: saying “I’m not interested right now” simply means that you’re going to get another email later on.
If you’re truly not interested, and don’t want another follow-up, keep it simple and friendly, but don’t worry about coming up with excuses; good salespeople see these as objections and know how to get past them.
Never feel bad about being direct. When I’m selling, I’m far more appreciative of a prospect being honest with me, as it saves me time and effort better spent chasing more qualified leads.
How do you find your audience’s pain points?
There are a few ways that we find pain points to cover in our content:
- Parsing our blog comments, emails and Tweets for questions
- Keyword research using Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool
- Reading other blogs that have covered the issue (and especially the comments)
- Surveying our customers
The first three are pretty self-explanatory (and the linked post explains more about keyword research), but the fourth is one that I think it would be helpful to expand on.
Surveys, and especially ones with open-ended questions, are a great way to uncover customer pain points in the language that the customers actually use to describe them.
Len covered six of the questions that we frequently ask in this guest post on Unbounce’s blog in great detail, and I encourage you to read the post, but I’ll list them here:
- Tell me about your experiences with [X] (X = your market, product, problem you’re solving, etc…)
- What’s the biggest problem for you with [X]? (here is where we start getting into pain points)
- What are your biggest frustrations with problem [X]? (2 and 3 might sound the same, but they are not; this becomes clear when you look at customer responses to them)
- How are you currently dealing with the problem? (this lets you put yourself into the reader’s shoes and know what they’ve already tried)
- What else have you already tried to solve the problem? What else are you thinking about trying? (again, this helps you relate to the reader and what they’re thinking)
- What would solving that problem allow you to achieve? (this tells you the key benefits that you need to promise in exchange for reading your content and putting it into action)
I wouldn’t ask all of these in a single survey, but I’d pick two or three and test from there.
If you can get even 20 or 30 surveys filled out, you’ll be armed with valuable insight that you can use to drive your content.
What if you can’t do influencer outreach?
Influencer outreach has been a tremendously successful strategy for us, and it’s a pretty easily repeatable strategy that others can use. That’s why I recommend it so much.
But it’s not the only way to succeed.
There are plenty of businesses that have gotten, and continue to get very successful with little to no focus on influencer outreach.
There are plenty of ways to grow a successful business, so if you don’t want to try your hand at influencer outreach, you don’t have to.
Look at your market, see what’s working for others who are successfully reaching the customers you want, and pick one of the many proven marketing strategies out there to start testing, whether it’s SEO, content Marketing without influencer outreach (focus on guest blogging), social media, affiliate marketing, traditional/digital advertising, or anything else.
