Pain Drives Sales
We’ve all heard the advice to focus on a customer’s pain points, but I recently had an experience that drove the point home for me.
I was in a Pilates class and realized that everyone in the class, including the instructor, had started Pilates to recover from an injury. I had been hearing about the value of Pilates for years, but like many people, I wasn’t willing to invest in the rather expensive and intensive workout. It took a problem to get me started.
Pain drives change.
This is true in our personal lives, and it’s true in sales.
This point was proven by the Sales VP of one of last year’s hottest growth companies. She told me the secret to her record growth was to start small and focus on a specific need.
Their cloud storage solution could be used in a number of ways, but when her salespeople tried to expand the deal beyond a specific pain point, it backfired.
A $7K per month SaaS deal can be approved overnight, but a $1M deal can take two years – and it is likely to die on the vine.
Sometimes the best strategy to get in the door is solving a pressing pain, then expand.
The same is true in a tactical sense during discovery calls.
In the Mutual Agenda, you may uncover several indications of need. It is best to uncover them all. But once you have a list, ask the buyer to pick the most important need so you can focus there first.
Ask all ten questions of the Need Diagnostic focused on the most pressing need. Drilling deep on the pain need will tap into urgency and compel action. Once you have tapped into personal, emotional priority, you can expand out to other needs.
Focus on what the buyer wants, not what you want.