Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

Today’s edition only takes 3 minutes.

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I have wanted to write about the Sunday Night Test™ for MONTHS. Until now, I never quite worked out how to write it.

Please hit "Reply" and let me know - did I miss the mark?

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"Sell this sizzle, not the sausage."

"Talk about benefits, not features."

"Buyers don't buy products. They buy solutions."
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I mentor, coach, and advise between 5-15 sellers most weeks. They range from:

• Experienced sellers with millions in closed business under their belt
• Technical founders who have just finished creating a product
• Junior sellers working their way into the industry and
• Everyone in between

They all struggle with getting in the shoes of their buyers to move the conversation forward.

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No one buys WHAT you are selling

Buyers aren't buying what you think you're selling.

The million-dollar question is:

If you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, exactly what buyers want to buy… you won't need me.

And it's different for every business.

Realistically you won't work it out on your first try. It might take a day, a month, a year.

The goal is to understand the buyer and their problems better than they can themselves.

When you can explain their pain so well the buyer's jaw drops, you'll know what your buyer is buying.

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Every buyer

Your explanation is even more challenging because most sellers try to sell to a vast market.

During my days selling MINDBODY (booking software for health/wellness/fitness businesses), a standard day of back-to-back sales calls looked like:

• First was a former stripper starting a Pole Fitness business.
• Next, a man was setting up a Muay Thai Gym for "professional" fighters.
• Finally, a former high-powered lawyer (who "found herself" in India) was opening her fourth yoga studio.

Despite buying the same software, these buyers need to hear slightly different pains and different examples and have a different buying experience.

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Niche and niche again

You'll never find one pithy line to resonate with all the personas you could sell to.

People reading this are outside of VC-backed, get-to-a-billion-or-go-bust style businesses. So stop acting like it.

The more specific you are, the better you can articulate your specific, hyper-focused niche and its pains.

Even as an individual sales rep, it paid to niche down. At one point during my MINDBODY days, I focused on Pole Fitness in Australia and NZ.

By understanding their businesses, I learned:

• Their ads were risque
• Commitment was usually term-based
• Their core customers were mothers ready to "feel sexy" again

Their business differed from the yoga, Pilates, Muay Thai, PT, day spa, hair salon, etc. businesses that also bought MINDBODY.

By hyper-niching, I became a known quantity and met ~50-60% of all owners of pole fitness studios in Australia and NZ.

Once you focus on a small niche, that's how you win.

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Sunday Night Test™

The question I hope you are thinking is: "That's nice, niche down, got it. But how do I know when I can better explain the problem to my niche than they can?"

Introducing the Sunday Night Test™

Grab a pen and paper and write a list based on the following: Imagine your buyer lying awake, in a cold sweat, on a Sunday night. The clock just struck 1 am, and they can't get to sleep:

• What is keeping them awake?
• What does their partner/spouse regret to bring up in front of them for fear of an overly emotional discussion?
• What do they desperately need more of but can't find?

Once you have a list, it's time to decide:

• Can we solve this? If yes, how?
• Is this solution believable to your buyer?
• Is this something your competitors don't have?

The Sunday Night Test™ is often a reframe of a feature or use case. For example:

• No one cares if the car has a spare tire - everyone worries about being stranded 32 km from home on a stinking hot summer day with a screaming child in the back seat.
• No one cares about dropping their wallet - everyone worries about a thief finding their bank card/s, stealing their mortgage payment, and they end up homeless.
• No one cares about an online booking platform - everyone worries their customer might struggle to book a pole fitness class or go to the competitor next door, and that customer was the difference between making rent or dipping into their savings - again.

Once you have come up with pains that are so vivid, visceral, and so vigorously expressive that your buyer can't help but get emotional on a sales call, you know you've made it.

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Hit reply and please let me know - did I miss the mark?

Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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