Turning Prospective Customers into Problems You Can Solve
How to stop selling and start listening
This guide details Stage 1 of our founder-driven sales framework. Be sure to see the overview and check your assumptions before you use this.
Let’s turn your network of contacts into market validated problems you can and should solve.
Find your target potential customers on LinkedIn
Connect with them
Discovering their problems
1. Find your target potential customers on LinkedIn
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a must—create a list of “prospects” using crucial filters to increase your response success and uses your 60 connection requests/week wisely. I always create a target list of companies (“accounts”) and add that as a filter. This ANDs the people’s profiles with the companies they work for (instead of ORs, based on the LinkedIn filter). Active on LinkedIn in 30 days, person’s location, 2nd connection, work experience, current title (and time in role) are also table stakes for a well-focused target.
🔎 Look at the number of prospects. If this number is lower than 200, you probably need to expand. If it’s above 1,000, you probably need to refine down more.
2. Connect with your prospects on LinkedIn
So now, with each of those prospects, you’ll send a connection request with a custom message. This puts your requests in their main app—and a custom message helps you stand out. Connecting adds immediate value to both sides of the connection—opening your network and profile to them. Some people don’t accept connection requests from people they don’t know, but then they’ll be much harder to sell—so let’s not worry about those privacy-focused individuals.
Here’s a great message template that works ~80% of the time for me:
“Hey <First Name>, I’m working on <problem/struggle> and would love to learn from your experience as a <Title> at <Company>. Can we connect?”
This keeps the ask immediate (there are yes/no buttons in the app) and small.
Note: If you’re getting a blocker requiring an email address, it’s because they get too many requests and have turned on this feature. You can try to find their work email via hunter.io, or just move on to the next person, as most people’s LinkedIn profiles are built off of their personal email.
Scheduling a call with your new connection
As soon as they accept your request on LinkedIn, a few things will happen:
You’ll get a new message thread with your custom message.
They might respond—typically with a question.
They might not respond, leaving it open for you to continue the conversation.
They can respond to you without accepting the connection request. That shouldn’t change any of the workflow—since we’re just keeping it in chat and they still “connected” with you by talking to you.
🎯 Your goal here is to get them on a zoom call for a qualitative discovery call. I usually just send 1-2 messages, as I don’t like to pester people, but I’ve seen different techniques work here.
Here’s a great message template that fits my personality:
“Hey <First Name>, thanks for connecting. <Answer any of their questions/references>. As I mentioned, I’m exploring <problem/struggle> and would love to learn from your perspective since you’ve been in the space for so long. Are you open to a 30min zoom?”
At this point, ideally they say sure. If not, you may have to get through an objection or two. Here’s some common responses that keep the conversation going:
“I’m not selling anything—just looking to learn to see if I’m even working on a painful problem or not.”
“I’d really like to verbally hear your responses to my questions, but here’s a few of the things I’m trying to learn: <hypothesis 1, hypothesis 2>. Would a phone call work?”
If they say yes, send:
“Great! If it’s easy for you, here are some times that work for me: <calendly link>. Otherwise, happy to work around your schedule.”
🗓️ Keep times as open as possible on your Calendly (5am? Sure! 10pm? Absolutely.) and have an option for them as early as tomorrow—anything sooner than that doesn’t give you time to prepare—or 2 weeks from now—but if they’re not available in the next 2 weeks, it’s probably not important enough for them.
3. Discovering their problems
Remember that sales objection we solved? It’s true. Your goal on this call is NOT to sell them something. Ideally, you don’t have something to even sell them now. Your goal is to learn from them. Ultimately, you’ll want to test a hypothesis with them. The earliest hypothesis is do they have a problem that’s cursing them.
CURSEs are: Crucial, Ubiquitous, Recurring, Specific, and Extreme problems.
This handy acronym checks to see if a problem is:
Crucial enough to the organization that real money is being spent on it
(have they already spent money trying to solve it?)Ubiquitous enough that there is a real market size to solving this problem
(everyone that you talk to, within a segment, has this problem)Recurring enough that this will stay top of mind for them
(you’ll retain them as users)Specific enough that they don’t feel like they have a great solution
(there’s room for a pull)Extreme enough that they’re willing to do something about it
(they’re pushed to find a solution)
There’s many different kinds of ways to get at these hypotheses in early discovery calls. Mach49’s Linda Yates published a great pain-script in her book, The Unicorn Within, but I personally like to run a Jobs to be Done (JTBD.org) discovery script here—which is a guided storytelling conversation that can be used to validate or invalidate your current hypothesis. Getting them to frame their experiences as a story is the best proxy for experiencing it and seeing what they’re thinking about/remember about that experience, without being biased about their hopes and desires or your experiences and ideas.
RECORD THESE CALLS
Just for your own note-taking purposes, but you’ll want to revisit these calls dozens if not hundreds of times in the future. Listening to the exact terminology someone uses, their tone of voice and even their body language. I personally like Fathom as my current zoom and google meet recorder of choice. You’ll want to get permission, and always be willing to turn it off, but 90% of people say yes if asked politely. (I like to send them the recording afterwards as well, as it gives them something of value, even if tiny).
At the end of the call, don’t forget next steps. I like to always ask 3 questions:
“Were there any questions I should’ve asked you, but didn’t?”
(you’ll be surprised what they’ll say sometimes—but most of the time this is a recap of whatever is top of mind for them for the conversation)“Can I reach back out as I make progress on this?”
(I’ve never been told no here, but this primes the pump for a second conversation, which you need to get to a pilot)“I’m trying to learn about <problem>. Is there anyone else that I should talk to? Maybe <NAME>?”
To get a warm referral to someone else. Be sure to reiterate what you’re trying to learn and who you want to talk to—and bring up the name of a person they might’ve talked about on the call.
After the call, see if it aligns with other problems you’ve received from other calls. Focus in on their emotions/perspectives. It’s important that you don’t try to solve it—yet.
If you’ve done a handful (5-10) of these calls and haven’t found a CURSEd problem, pivot to a different person. A pivot can be a refining of your current stakeholder (maybe it’s only software developers in their first month of learning a new language) or a reframing (it’s actually the first time someone learns anything new, not just software developers).
When you’ve found a problem that meets the CURSE criteria, turn this into a list of hypotheses of problems for your back burner. You’ll want to come back to this step a few times, and it’s easier to create a list before you’ve moved on too far from these conversations.
While this is more of an art than a science, this format might help:
“We Believe That…. <person> has <problem> during <context>, which causes them to feel <emotion>. They currently do <bad solution>, which costs them <quantified expense>.
If you’re unsure of the others, just write down all the different emotions that were expressed related to this one problem in your conversations. Write down the impacts that this problem has. That’s a good start to keep a variety of words as a list of different problems.
Once you have found a CURSEd problem, it’s time to validate it, in it’s simplest form—the value proposition. Let’s move into Stage 2, or how we use these Problems to develop the right Pilot with our first paying customers.