Understandable. Nobody likes pain. But the reality is, when you’re in pain, you want somebody to take care of it for you. That’s how prospects feel about their pain. When they meet with you, they’re looking for someone to trust who’ll alleviate their pain. You can be their doctor.When’s the last time you experienced pain? Jabbing, stabbing pain. Emotionally upsetting pain. Bet you couldn’t wait to get over it. You would have done anything for it to go away. Your doctor was your Superman, your Spiderman, and your Lord of the universe whom you depended on to heal your pain.
Human beings that they are, prospects won’t tell you about their pain right away. Nobody does that. Instead, they’ll talk about pain indicators.
Revenue could be down. That’s a pain indicator. Competition is beating them up in their market space. That’s a pain indicator. Sales were lagging in the last two quarters. That’s a pain indicator.
Look at it this way. Getting to pain with a prospect is like turning on the pain radio. Talking about pain indicators is like having the pain radio on low volume.
That’s great for starters. But prospects don’t buy from you if all you do is address their pain indicators. They buy when you move through their pain indicators to the pain(s) underlying their pain indicators. To do that, you need to turn up the volume on the pain radio.
The best way to boost the volume is to review what a prospect has done to resolve his or her pain indicators and contrast the current situation with where the prospect hopes to be. Metrics play a major role here.
The sharper the measurement the better--say in terms of dollars--of a pain indicator the better. What a problem costs is often a critical metric.
The key qualifier comes in when you prompt the prospect to verbalize how the pain indicators make him or her feel. This gets to the pain of the prospect. Doing so opens the door to talk about what’s troublesome about the present and how he or she will feel when you have solved the problem(s).
At the start of this blog, we talked about pain and how we want to alleviate it. Well, prospects will buy from you when they trust you, the doctor, to resolve their pain so they can feel better. Then, you’ll have a sale.
Getting to pain is getting to a sale. No pain = no sale.
|
|
You might also be interested in:
