For Successful Selling, Uncover Your Prospect's Pain

Sales techniques, like fashions, go out of style. Once upon a time, salespeople found some measure of success simply by plugging their product or service and telling sales prospects about all the special features that made it (or them) different than the competition.

That process simply doesn’t work anymore. Prospects are suffering from message overload, and they will tune you out if your sales pitch consists of a recitation of the benefits of buying from you. A far more effective approach involves showing prospects how you or your product can solve their problems. Remember, selling is never about you or your product, it is all about your prospective customer.

The trick here, of course, is figuring out what your prospects’ problems are. In order to understand what might move them to action — buying from you — you have to understand what I call their pain.
For our purposes, we define pain as the gap between where a prospect is and where he or she wants to be. If you’re a computer consultant, perhaps your prospective client is spending huge amounts of time dealing with a system that is frequently crashing, thereby crippling his ability to get a work project completed. What he wants is to be functioning smoothly, without the time delays and hassle that an inadequate system can cause.

Savvy salespeople know that prospects buy when they can do something to reduce their “pain,” and that many times, people make a decision to buy something emotionally, and justify it intellectually later. As a sales person, you are an agent of change, and you must find an emotionally compelling reason to get a prospect to act or change.

Don’t think of pain as simply something that is negative in a prospect’s environment, but rather as an emotionally compelling reason to change or act. Perhaps you can help a prospect solve, eliminate or avoid a problem; but on a more positive note, maybe you can help him or her achieve a specific goal or dream. Can your products or services help your prospect do something she really wants to do (e.g., expand the business, reduce factory down time)? If your answer is yes, you’ve found a personal motive for the prospect to change.

So how do you begin to uncover a prospect’s pain? First you need to understand the three elements of pain.

First there’s the problem: what is or isn’t happening in your prospect’s business. Typically, this is on the surface and is fairly easy to get to. Your prospect’s business may not be growing as fast as he or she would like because sales are stagnant.

Second, you need to uncover the reasons for the problem, or the “why” behind the “what.” (This is usually associated with business pain and has a cost associated to it.) The problem a prospect brings is that you almost never see the real problem. You have to dig for the underlying problems that contribute to the surface pains.

An example from my own business: As a sales trainer, I often find that my prospects are concerned with their low rate of closing deals. Through questioning, I often discover the real problem isn’t in the techniques they use to close deals, it’s the poor job they’re doing qualifying prospects. They’re attempting to go after deals they shouldn’t waste their time on. This is a contributing reason for their surface problem, the “why” behind the “what.” You also need to understand the consequences of the problem. This is the impact of solving the problem (or the negative impact of living with it) and how it affects your prospect on a direct and personal level. One of the most important things you can do to uncover a prospect’s pain is to have a systematic approach to asking questions that will allow you to move from surface to business to personal pain.

What questions should you ask when trying to find a prospect’s pain? In our practice we use a systematic sequence of questions that we call a pain funnel. By following the process (and it takes considerable practice), we can move a prospect from being intellectually involved to being emotionally involved, thus improving our chances of getting a sale. The questions in our process are as follows:

Can you be a bit more specific about the problems your business faces? Can you give me an example? Asking prospects to provide examples or specifics of their issues helps you define the problem.

How long has this been a problem? Asking how long it has been a problem helps you to determine urgency. Dealing with a problem that has been around a long time tells you that this may not be a great prospect. If a business is successfully functioning with the problem, there’s no pressing need to change things. What have you done to try to fix the problem? Finding out what a prospect has already done helps you avoid the trap of suggesting something that has already been tried. Suggesting solutions that have already failed destroys your credibility and immediately blocks you from moving forward with this prospect.