Customer pain constitutes powerful motivating factor

If you’ve ever spent time around a sales department or salespeople, chances are that you’ve heard the term “pain” bandied about. Unfortunately, this word is often used loosely. David Sandler, founder of the Sandler Selling System in 1968, is credited with being the first sales guru to identify the idea of pain as a powerful buying motive.

What Sandler realized was that a prospect moving away from something (pain) is a much more powerful motivator than one who is moving toward something (pleasure). That’s not to say that your product might not be a pleasure-motivated purchase. However, you and your team would do well to have a discussion about common pains that motivate your customers to buy from you.

While the concept of identifying a prospect’s pain became fashionable over the years, like many concepts, this one became watered-down. Even your least-skilled competitor is probably able to get some surface pain on a sales call. But what separates the women from the girls and the men from the boys is a salesperson’s ability to go deeper than the surface.

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We call this putting together the “pain puzzle,” a way to build out pain to identify a deeper level of pain – an important concept if you agree that most people make buying decisions for emotional reasons (and only use logic and intellect to justify them).

The first level of pain is what we would call ‘surface pain.’ As the skilled salesperson explores surface pain with the prospect, she will ask important questions to help the prospect discover the causes and reasons of that pain, which will become the basis for the second level of pain.

It’s very important to note that the salesperson must be patient during this exploratory process to allow the prospect to discover these causes and reasons from their own perspective. Then, the salesperson will test the prospect’s motivation to fund a solution to the pain. This is the third and deepest level of pain development, which we call “personal impact.”

Without a meaningful personal impact, there is always a strong possibility that the prospect is not committed enough to invest money with you or your company on a solution. Prospects like this may only be gathering information to see if they can obtain lower pricing from you than their incumbent supplier. When the salesperson abandons the pain identification process without identifying impact, there is a good chance that salesperson may end up providing “free consulting.” In this instance, the salesperson may end up chasing a prospect who is either unwilling or unable to buy.

Many salespeople are all too happy to focus on being ‘busy’ and putting any and everything they can in the pipeline.  They would rather ignore the fact they are forecasting unrealistic business in their pipeline than challenge the prospect to expose their pain and either agree or disagree to pursue a solution together.

A salesperson reading through this material might say “yes, but eventually I will close some of those deals where only weak pain or marginal interest exists.” While that is true, a salesperson with that mindset often prospects less new business as they hope the weak opportunities in their pipeline will close. These salespeople are unknowingly taking a drug called “Hopium,” as in “I hope our prices are lower than the competitions.” “I hope the prospect will fire their current provider,” and “I hope they will actually start returning my phone calls and emails after putting me off for weeks and/or months.”

At the end of the day, a prospect who has one pain hurts a little. A prospect who has realized they have a couple of pains feels sick. When a prospect reveals the personal impact of three pains or more, now they are in critical condition. And guess what? If your service or product can provide the remedy for that pain, you now have a patient sitting in front of a doctor who will emphatically ask for that doctor’s help. Don’t stop your discovery call with your prospect at the first sign of queasiness – complete the pain puzzle to be sure you have a real and motivated prospect in front of you that not only needs your help, but wants it.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Reach him at 303-928-9163 or bbolak@sandler.com.