Every B2B startup experiences the rite of painful passage.
Over the years, I’ve seen it over and over and OVER again across B2B startups that are constantly trying to reach specific revenue outcomes.
They play around with different channels. You try outbound. You try demand generation campaigns. You try every social ad in the playbook. And maybe even rewrite your homepages a billion times because it’s not up to snuff with your “positioning.”
If you’re running outbound or lifecycle campaigns, you need to realize there are levels of painful messaging your customers are experiencing.
Here’s how to identify them.
External and internal validation
Buyers don’t leave the status quo because of the pain they feel today. They leave because of the pain they are afraid of months from now.
If you’re crafting outbound or marketing emails, you need to do two things to identify the pain:
- Validate 2-3 pain points from sales calls and internal customer data
- Validate 2-3 pain points from external data like Reddit, surveys, and forums
The mistake is looking at the happiness of why customers love you or your competitors.
What you’re actually looking for is the painful destination your customers are on and their need to express it. You want to know where they are and where they want to be.
With every painful destination, you’ll find three things:
- Clock – this is a launch, a renewal, a new quarter, something that drives urgency
- Witness – who’s watching this pain unravel that makes that pain even more visceral
- Number – this could be a revenue number you’re trying to hit.
This is the pain that accumulates and has to be tied to your messaging to understand where the customer wants to be.
Pain is entry
Every person can use AI to look at a company’s pain. Congrats, you’re like everyone else.
The true test is knowing what to do with the pain. Instead of giving your customers a solution, walk them through the solution so they can solve it themselves.
A great doctor doesn’t hand you medicine and say peace out. They have bedside manner and tell you what you need to do. They give you reassurance. And that’s what your messaging needs to capture.
So don’t just diagnose the problem. Diagnose the situation they are in. More importantly, recognize the empathy you need in those situations that you need in your messaging.
Expressing the pain
You fix this in your messaging by putting the clock, the witness, and the number into your messaging.
You stop guessing a generic problem. You don’t say stuff like, “your outbound isn’t working.” Well duh.
Say something like, “You have three AEs starting in January and may be sending sequences that don’t align with your positioning.”
Or you build it around a number (not generic nonsense).
“Companies see a 3x reply rate” (BORING)
Vs.
“Based on your sending domain’s health, you might be seeing these reply rates. But you can get 3% higher rates by doing this instead.”
Now you’re cooking with gas.
Remember, you have to ask questions that are framed from your customer’s perspective. That requires more digging and figuring out what they care about in their world right now.
Less about you. More about them.
Ben