I'm having trouble identifying problems worth building solutions for and resonating with prospects on sales calls. How can I find efficient ways to discover these problems?
Your main issue is figuring out which problems in a business are worth solving. I use a simple four‑letter acronym, RACE, to evaluate any system: Reach – get more eyeballs on the brand; Acquire – generate interest and book meetings; Convert – turn that interest into revenue; Expand – increase the lifetime value of existing customers. If a system addresses at least one of these stages, it’s likely a solid opportunity for most businesses. Many companies, even large ones, get stuck on one of these bottlenecks, so focusing on them gives you a sizable market and higher urgency, allowing you to charge more. Approach every conversation as a consultation: determine whether the prospect has a big enough problem you can solve profitably. Avoid the "close at any cost" mindset; instead, deliver long‑term value. Ask prospects how they currently Reach, Acquire, Convert, and Expand their customers, and consider sprinkling AI into those processes for better results.
First, congratulations on generating leads—that’s the hardest part. If you want to close more deals, consider partnering with sales‑oriented people on a revenue‑share basis; you can often find such partners in free communities or school groups. But the real key isn’t polishing your pitch; it’s sticking to a repeatable sales process and refining it through repetition. You can succeed with almost any outbound method as long as you put in the reps. My personal approach treats each call as a discovery session, not a pitch. I ask why they took the call, what stood out about my outreach, and what their goals are (e.g., learning more about X, Y, Z). This lets me understand their actual needs instead of pushing a preset solution. I then tailor my recommendation to their specific situation—much like a doctor diagnosing before prescribing. Because I’ve run this discovery process many times, I’ve become good at it, and it works well for me.
You need to deliver a large amount of perceived value up front. Understand the prospect’s problem and press their pain points. Provide something of value immediately, such as an asset‑based outreach piece. The goal is to make a call feel worthwhile. While e‑com platforms already have many built‑in tools, you can still add value by improving how people deliver services rather than products.
I treat every lead‑gen method—whether Upwork, cold email, or organic social—as feeding into a Disco (discovery) call. On that call I ask why they responded to me, what the first and last touchpoints with their business are, what they’ve tried before, and what didn’t work. This gives me the keys to their kingdom, allowing me to run a consultative sales process. I also do quick research—like using ChatGPT to outline the average customer journey for a local HVAC business—so I can speak knowledgeably and make the prospect feel I understand their space.
We already work with any industry on anything they need—AI systems, business software, automations. The simplest way to start productizing is not to invent a new service, but to look at what you’ve already delivered that clients liked and double down on that. Make a list of every project you’ve done over the past year, pull the email threads, project files, and note the industries and types of work. Patterns will emerge: you’ll see which systems you built most often and, more importantly, which ones generated the most revenue. Use that data to decide which services to package. Then, reach out to the clients you built those high‑value systems for, remind them of the results, and ask for referrals and repeat business. Reactivating past clients is a low‑effort way to generate upsells—typically a 3‑4% uptake rate, and I’ve seen 15‑20% when I first started. Identify the most profitable, least time‑intensive product you’ve created—often an automated follow‑up agent or similar—and turn it into a repeatable checklist or product. Streamline the delivery: ask if you really need three discovery calls or if a single call or a form will suffice, reducing time investment and allowing you to raise prices, which is pure leverage. In short, catalog your past work, find the high‑margin, low‑effort services, market them to similar clients, reactivate old customers, and refine the process into a sellable product.