What to say when everyone already knows the problem
Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.
Open any B2B sales page in any category and you will find the same first move: name the pain. Your pipeline is unpredictable. Your reps waste hours on research. Your data is stale. All true, all recognisable — and all completely inert, because every competitor opens exactly the same way.
There is a better model for this, credited to the sales coach Taki Moore and laid out by Stephen Steers on Startups For the Rest of Us. It splits customer problems into three levels, and almost all marketing lives at the first one.
Level 1 — the known, said problem
What the customer will discuss openly with anyone. Everybody in the industry knows it. It is in the trade press and on every vendor's homepage.
"A salon owner has trouble retaining clients."
Saying this back to a prospect proves nothing. You have demonstrated that you know what industry they are in. Worse, because every competitor opens here, level-1 messaging actively makes you interchangeable — you have volunteered for the comparison grid.
Level 1 is not useless. It is table stakes: get it wrong and you are disqualified. Get it right and you have earned exactly the right to keep talking.
Level 2 — the known, unsaid problem
What they know perfectly well but would only tell someone they trust — because they are slightly embarrassed by it, or unsure whether it is normal, or because saying it out loud has political cost.
The salon owner knows retention is bad. What they do not say out loud is that they have no idea which stylists are losing the clients, and they suspect it is the one they cannot afford to confront.
When your copy names a level-2 problem, the reaction is specific and recognisable: "oh, you understand me." That is the moment a cold prospect starts reading properly. It is also the moment the comparison grid stops mattering, because no competitor's homepage said it.
Level-2 problems are findable, but not from firmographic data. They come from talking to customers and — crucially — from listening for the thing said after the official answer. The official answer is level 1. The sentence that starts "honestly, the real issue is…" is level 2.
Level 3 — the unknown, unsaid problem
The connection the prospect cannot see until you show them. Steers calls it pay dirt, and describes the effect precisely:
Once shown, they can't unsee it, so everything else in their business is now viewed through that lens.
Stephen Steers
For the salon: this lack of software is not only losing you clients — it is losing you good stylists, because your best ones can't prove their book is growing, and it is quietly pushing up your rent per productive chair.
That is a different kind of sentence. It does not describe a pain the prospect brought to the conversation. It rearranges how they see their own business, and it makes your category the lens.
Level 3 is where genuine differentiation lives, and it is hard for the obvious reason: it requires you to understand the customer's business better than the customer has bothered to. That is expensive. It is also the only moat available in messaging, because a competitor can copy your level-1 and level-2 lines off your website in an afternoon and cannot copy an insight they have not had.
How to find each level
Level 1 — read three competitors' homepages. Whatever all three say, that is level 1. Do not lead with it. Cover it somewhere so you are not disqualified, then move on.
Level 2 — go through your last ten customer calls and find every sentence that began with a hedge: honestly, to be fair, the real problem is, between us. Those hedges are level-2 markers. If you have no recordings, ask five current customers one question: what did you expect this to fix that you would not have put in writing at the time?
Level 3 — take a level-2 problem and ask "and what does that cost them somewhere else in the business?" three times in a row. The first answer is usually still level 2. The third is often level 3, because it has crossed a departmental boundary. Cross-boundary consequences are invisible from inside a department, which is exactly why the prospect has not seen them.
Why this matters more in cold outreach than anywhere else
A prospect reading your website has already chosen to be there. A prospect reading a cold email has not, and gives you one sentence before deciding what you are.
A level-1 opener — "most teams struggle to keep their prospect data fresh" — is correctly classified as a template within about four words, because it is true of everybody and therefore addressed to nobody.
A level-2 opener is addressed to a person. A level-3 opener is the rarest thing in an inbox: information. It is worth reading even if the reader never buys, and that is the actual bar for cold outreach — not "is this persuasive" but "is this worth the ninety seconds regardless of the outcome."
The practical version
For each segment you sell to, write three sentences and keep them on one page:
- The problem they will say out loud. (Cover it. Do not lead with it.)
- The problem they would only admit to someone they trust. (Lead with this.)
- The consequence they have not connected yet. (Earn the meeting with this.)
If you cannot fill in row three, you do not yet know the segment well enough to differentiate in it — and no amount of subject-line testing will substitute. That is a research gap, not a copywriting gap, and the fix is conversations.
Keep reading
- Personalisation that works, and personalisation that costs you trust Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
- The only prospects worth emailing this quarter Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
- How to size a market in four minutes Most growth plans die on arithmetic nobody did. Four crude numbers, multiplied on the back of an envelope, will tell you whether a segment can produce your target at all — before you spend a quarter finding out.