Shifting from Pain to Problem When Selling
A patient visits his doctor and says, “Doctor, when I touch my leg, it hurts. When I touch my arm, it hurts. When I touch my nose, it hurts. What happened? Are they all broken?” The doctor answers, “You don’t have a broken leg, arm, or nose. You have a broken finger.”
Prospects often don’t know what their true problem is; they think it is the pain. If that is what you hear, you will be tempted to provide someone with aspirin when they may have cancer.
Pain questions fall into categories – Speed, Product, Service, or Price. In each of these, the measures are set by the prospect, and the salesperson chases ways that they can fix those pains. The answers to whatever version of the “What keeps you up at night?” question used to discover the “pain,” sound like this –
Speed – “We’re just not getting it done fast enough.”
Product – “Our product has too many returns.”
Service – “Our customers are not happy with their experience working with us.”
Price – “We’re not price competitive. We need to decrease our costs.”
These aren’t problems; they’re symptoms – traditionally called in the world of sales, pain.
When they provide a pain answer to your questions with a measure of what they believe success is, you have now entered a horse race of who can make whatever pain they have a bit better. You and your competitors are racing around the track to promise less pain for a lower price. The game is set, and you can’t differentiate except by promise and price.
Change your questions from pain to problems. Problems, for senior executives, are about Time, Money, and Risk. Important note: Time is not speed, Money is not price, and Risk is not service.
When you are speaking with a senior-level buyer, questions about problems sound like this-
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Time – “What is the cycle time between your organization’s performance in this area and when you recognize that you are not at your standard or a customer’s?”
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Money – “What is the total cost of producing a product or serving a customer? Where does that show up in your financial statements – Income statement, revenue forecast, COGS, Balance Sheet?”
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Risk – “What is the result of a sustained performance at the current level to the business?”
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You discover problems instead of pain based upon the questions that you ask. Change the categories and scope of questions, and you will change what you talk about and with whom.
You get sent to whom you sound like.
Lower-level buyers have pain issues. Higher-level buyers have business problems. What is good for the people selling is that when you are solving big problems, you are speaking with people at higher levels who can sign larger contracts. Problems solved pay more than pains experienced.
