While business owners are simply customers like you and me, selling to a business owner is much different than selling to the average person. Business owners need to be approached in a specific way if you want to sell to them successfully—that way is The Problem Solver Method™, a unique way of approaching marketing content that increases its effectiveness exponentially.
In this webinar, led by marketing expert Heather Steele and Certified Exit Planning Advisor Ray Croff, you’ll learn all about The Problem Solver Method™, including what it is, why it works so well for marketing content that targets business owners, and how you can implement it in your business right away.
We’ll also cover some of the most important aspects of the method, including why you need to work the full sales funnel, how to put The Problem Solver Method™ into place in your marketing efforts right away, and some practical applications of The Problem Solver Method™.
But first, you’ll need to learn a hard (but important) lesson…
Nobody Cares About Your Business
What many business owners who sell products and services to other business owners fail to realize is that no one cares about your business—people are focused on themselves and their success, not on you.
When you create marketing content that’s focused on you you you, people’s eyes glaze over—they have problems, interests, needs, things that are highly important and top-of-mind for them. They’re not interested in learning about you or your business—they’re interested in what you can do for them, how you can help them get where they want to go.
This isn’t selfishness—this is how our brains work.
How Your Brain Works—And Why Marketing Content Has to Take This Into Account
The human brain is essentially a product of many thousands of years of threats—we weren’t always king of the hill and top of the food chain, so our ancestors spent enormous amounts of time looking for and being prepared for threats.
And if you know anything about how large, dangerous animals hunt, you know that threats are rarely slow—you usually have to react in the blink of an eye, which means our brains got really, really good at scanning constantly for threats.
On top of that, for the majority of our history, human beings have been in a near-constant state of starvation. Even after agriculture was invented, we still struggled with starvation, and it is only in the last 70 years or so that large swaths of humanity have been able to stop thinking about where they’re going to get their next meal all the time.
To put it simply, our brains have gotten very used to the idea of always needing to be on the lookout for food, so as we’re scanning for threats, we’re also scanning for opportunities, and we have a very clear idea of what we want—hunger is a powerful motivator.
Just because we live in an age of computers and AI doesn’t mean our brains have caught up yet. We’re still looking for threats—we’ve just downgraded what that means. Threats are things that waste our time. Time is the thing we’re lowest on now, not food, and our problems are more complex. We’re scanning for solutions to our problems these days, and we’re ignoring the things that get in the way of our time.
This is all subconscious, which means that you can’t really get around it. You can’t rely on people to take time, sit down with your marketing message, mull it over, read or watch the whole thing, rewatch it and reread it—that’s just not how it works.
You have seconds to connect with someone, and if your customers’ brain sees you as a waste of their time, you’re a threat, and you’re avoided. This determination will happen so fast in their brain that they won’t even know it. People see thousands of marketing messages a day. Business owners see even more, and their time is even more precious.
If you want to reach them, you need to be an opportunity, something that speaks to the problem they have today, something that can help them survive. Then, and only then, will they listen to you.
They don’t care about your business—they care about what you can do for them.
Don’t Introduce Yourself, Introduce Your Solution, and Keep It Simple
If you’re marketing something that people don’t know they need or don’t think they need—categories that exit planning often falls into—you have to do a really good job of reaching business owners right away. If you’re talking about yourself, you’ve already failed at this task.
Once you’re able to spark interest, the rest of our brain starts to pay attention. We focus on this new opportunity and begin evaluating it. Now you have more time to sell your solution.
But first, you need to talk about the problems they care about. Exit planning isn’t a problem most business owners care about, but they do care about things like increasing revenue, decreasing their business’s dependence on them, and reducing risk.
They have problems you solve—you need to speak their language to help them understand this. You need to focus on those problems, the ones that are top of mind. Then, you can have deeper conversations.
This means your initial marketing messages to a prospect should be focused on their problems and your solutions. That first email, that first social media post, that first Google ad—they all need to focus on problems.
Then, once your audience has focused on you and is listening to what you have to say, you can introduce the bigger problem—selling a business is very difficult, and most people aren’t able to do it successfully (or get the amount they want).
If you show them that you’re a problem solver, that you can be trusted with these smaller problems, you’ve reduced their fear, you’ve increased their trust in you, you’ve got their attention, and you can now have a real conversation about exit planning.
A Value Statement People Actually Care About
Your value proposition or value statement is the thing you do for people that brings them value, that makes you a good person to hire. For this to work successfully, you need to keep going down the path of focusing on their needs.
First, you need to speak directly to your target audience, which should be as narrow as you can get it. If you’re trying to market to everyone, you’re not marketing to anyone. Targeted marketing messages are much more effective than broad ones.
These messages need to address your audience’s pain points. What are the things that are making them uncomfortable? What are the issues that matter the most to them? Focusing on their pain makes them more likely to pay attention to you.
Now you can prove your value, the thing that makes you unique. You still have to focus that message on them, but if you show why you care and why your unique solution is the best, you’re much more likely to make that connection.
Finally, you have to prove your credibility. Show your prospects that you’re more than a smooth talker, that other people trust you as well. You also need to show them how other customers have found success with you—recommendations from previous customers is highly valuable.
Introduce a Proven Process
Because consulting services can feel very ambiguous, many business owners will struggle to see the value of what you offer right away. However, if you can present them with a clear plan that includes expectations for what they need to contribute and clear potential outcomes.
Being able to articulate your process in your marketing materials makes you much more likely to be able to effectively sell to them. It proves that you’ve done this before, that you know what you’re doing, which builds your credibility immediately and makes prospects more likely to want to work with you.
If you can show them a process that they can visualize and provide examples of former clients who have gone through that process and reached their goals as a result, new potential clients are going to feel a lot more confident about working with you.
The danger here is that, as we all know, these processes are enormously complex. Showing a client that entire process can be overwhelming and off-putting.
However, if you can just include a simplified, stripped-down version of the process in your marketing materials, the danger of them feeling overwhelmed is greatly reduced. Try to stay under 5 steps—this is simple enough for someone to take in all at once and wrap their head around.
All of this ensures the clients you take on are set up to be good clients to work with. They’re clear on their time and resource commitment, so they’re less likely to become problem clients down the road.
Now that you’ve got a clear idea of how The Problem Solver Method™ works, you can start creating marketing content and materials, right?
Well, not quite yet—first, you need to understand the most important question you have to ask about every piece of marketing you ever put out into the world: who cares?
The “Who Cares?” Test
The “Who Cares?” Test is simple—if you’re going to create a blog post or a marketing brochure or a Google ad or anything in between, you need to ask yourself, “Who cares about this information?”
If the only answer you can come up with is “we do”, then that content probably needs to stay on the drawing board.
Many people have this imaginary checklist in their head of all the things they “should” be doing when it comes to marketing, but in reality, the only things you should be doing are the things that speak to your clients—the things that they’re interested in.
The best way to find this out is to just talk to your clients! Ask them what spoke to them (if they decided to work with you) and what spoke to them about competitor marketing (if they decided to work with someone else).
If the marketing content you’re thinking of creating passes this test and is effective when you try it out, it shouldn’t be a one-time thing—you should use it repeatedly.
Say It Again
Most human beings like variation, and when you’re creating marketing messages and materials, it can be tempting to keep reinventing the wheel, to keep making changes and alterations, to always be trying to put out something new.
We hate to break it to you, but new doesn’t always mean better. If you’ve found messaging that works, you need to keep using it for a simple reason—most people have to see your marketing messages numerous times before they take action.
The lowest number of “touches”—times that people see your marketing message—required before someone makes a strong connection and actually starts thinking about working with you is 3. Many experts put it around 8 or more.
That means your potential clients need to see 8 pieces of marketing before they even think about talking to you.
If those messages are all different, if they’re saying different things (or the same thing in many different and hard-to-understand ways), then you’re going to need even more touches to be effective.
However, if they hear the same message 8 times, they’re more likely to take action. Remember, people aren’t giving your marketing messages their full attention. They don’t care about your messages for the most part. It’s not important to be cute and clever. It’s important that they see that same clear message enough times that they finally start paying attention.
Plus, you can then reuse and repurpose a lot of your content, which makes creating new marketing materials much, much easier.
Think about this—if you post one time on Instagram with a single marketing message, most people are going to barely glance at it as they scroll past. If you put a completely different marketing message on another post, the work that first post did is lost—they’re not making that connection.
If you’re spending a ton of time working on new message after new message, your actual publication rate is going to be much lower than it could be, which means so much time will pass between messages that you’ll never have an impact. People have too many other things in their lives begging for their attention—you’ll get lost in the shuffle.
When you repeatedly put messages out there using a clear pattern of repetition—like the Fibonacci sequence—you have a better chance of reaching the critical mass of touches necessary to move someone to action.
Consistency matters a great deal. You never know where in the sales funnel a prospect is when they see a piece of your marketing content. You never know when they’re going to be ready to buy. Your content might actually push them further down the funnel. If you keep publishing, eventually, your content is going to reach them at the right time to convert them into a lead.
To put it simply—you’re staying top of mind for them. When it’s time to buy, they’ll think of you.
Working the Full Funnel
Exit planning professionals spend an enormous amount of time prospecting for clients, which means they have a lot less time for revenue-generating activities. That makes it incredibly important to move people all the way through the funnel and avoid derailing sales opportunities.
A sales funnel starts out as wide as possible with many potential clients (leads) and narrows as people self-select out for various reasons, including not being ready to buy now, changing their minds, choosing a competitor, and many other reasons.
Initially, you’re just working to generate awareness and interest in potential leads. You’re trying to push them to engage in some way, even if it’s as simple as visiting your website. Once they start engaging and see the solutions you provide and the problems you solve, many will be converted into leads.
The process you have to get leads in the first place is crucial because, without leads, you have no one to push down the funnel. You can do this in a variety of ways—paid ads on social media or Google, search engine optimization (SEO), direct outreach, or simply plain old networking.
To do this right, you need to be spending time every week on lead-generation activities. This is the only way to ensure you always have new leads coming in to keep revenue flowing.
However, there’s so much more that comes with working the full funnel… watch the rest of the webinar above to find out what you need to be doing here to make the most out of your leads and grow your business.
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