Category Archives: 3. Stage Three – Discover

Struggling for Traction

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It’s very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of the hamster wheel inside the fishbowl of building your business and forget about the overall opportunity parameters.

If you are struggling for traction, it indicates that you may be:

  • Experiencing a mismatch between what you believe to be the opportunity and the reality of the opportunity (this is very common in the immediate-post-bar-napkin, just-keep-grinding and true-believer phases)
  • Building a solution looking for a problem (this is typical of engineering driven companies)
  • Not understanding who your ideal customer is and what their pain is (this is also typical of engineering driven companies)
  • Lacking sufficient ideal customers who are willing to pay for a solution to their pain at a price point that supports a sustainably profitable business model (this is a strategic leadership error, typically a variation of “it’s my idea so it must be good”)
  • Not effectively creating the perception of need in your prospects (this is marketing’s job, and this is fairly common when building solutions looking for a problem)
  • Not closing on the perceived need (this is sales’ job, and this one is rare compared to the others in this list)

The Big! Long! Scary! Sales Page Questionnaire

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One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make is being feature focused rather than benefits focused.

When you read most startup web sites or marketing materials, the focus is on features, not benefits.

Those companies all fail the “What’s in it for me?” test for the customer.

Customers are actually not very interested in your product or service features. What they are very interested in is what benefits does your product or feature have for them, directly and specifically.

If you are struggling to conceptualize or articulate your product or service’s answer to the “What’s in it for me?” test, try this excellent questionnaire, courtesy  of Naomi Dunford from the ittybiz blog.

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The Big! Long! Scary! Sales Page Questionnaire
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The secret of a successful sales page is focusing more on the
customer’s needs than the product itself.  You want your customer
to say to themselves that YOU really understand what they’re going
through, and that because of that they can be confident your
product can help them.

The more detail you have on your ideal customers and their needs,
the easier it will to create copy that makes them click that “buy”
button.

IMPORTANT! Try to answer all of the questions that you can, even if
they’re hard to answer in your specific situation. If something
really doesn’t apply to you, you can skip it. But try, though.

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