Building pain, before jumping to gain, when selling

I spent last week with one of our clients (I wish I could tell you who!), a business-to-business sales organisation that relies heavily on cold-calling (or at least lukewarm calling) as the front end of their engagement strategy.  I’m not here to comment on the merits or pitfalls of cold-calling. But my time with them did remind me of some key ideas that lead to successful selling, whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transactionally or consultatively.

Organisations in this situation, like our client, often spend a lot of time and energy trying to hone the perfect pitch. In the old days, this often meant training the team to list off benefits of your solution, and to educate accounts as to why your solution was the best. In other words, lots of telling. If your key approach rests on these issues, stop here. You’ll need to reorganise your thinking to focus on your account, not you.

More modern organisations focus on identifying a potential client’s key Pain Points (or similar terminology), and then defining a way to explain how their product or service exactly addresses those. This is a huge step in the right direction – being customer-focused – and it was the situation we found at our client.

But this refinement still misses the mark for a successful customer-centric sales methodology: it is still fundamentally telling them about us. Ideally, sales people need to get their customers talking, and thinking, about their business, their needs, how they could change or revolutionise their process, etc. Even if you’ve been told to “challenge” your accounts, you need to get them to talk, to internalise, and to challenge their assumptions. You'll get there through questioning. 

Last week we focused on Pain Questions as a big part of the missing solution.  Sales teams were already asking about Pain Points, but then they jumped right into telling the account about their solutions. Anyone who’s ever been sold to by a persistent, overly assumptive sales person can tell you that this kind of telling is rarely successful.  

Pain Questions dig into the implications of the current situation, before moving on to the Gain or reward of fixing it. This can often help to build discomfort around the current situation by uncovering – and building – the consequences of not acting. This is done by asking questions, not by telling them, in order to help amplify the current situation. Use questions like, “What are the implications of that?” “How often does that happen?” “What’s the customer experience like in those situations?” etc.

We found, almost immediately, that the impact and effectiveness of the calls improved. Instead of telling the account why their solution was better, they listened to the specific issues facing the person on the phone, they asked questions that probed and built up the situation, and then they tailored future comments to address the specific issues and pains that they had just magnified.

So the key here is to make sure that selling organisations are digging deeper to uncover the key issues and the true implications behind them. Often, the really good question is the follow-up question. For instance:

Sales: “You mentioned that invoicing is an issue, how often are you finding that there are invoicing errors?”

Client: “About 10% of the time.”

Sales: “OK. And what is the experience, from a customer perspective, when that happens?”

The first question was a good one, and revealed useful information that can be used to help sell in our solutions. But the second one can really start to build pain – in this case strategic pain - for the account.

So what should you do with your team?

• -    Listen in to their calls to see your team is asking about the implications, costs, or consequences of the current situation, as opposed to just the existence or non-existence of certain situations. Coach them to ask questions and dig more deeply before jumping to the solution.
• -   At your next team meeting, get people to think about what questions might build pain at their contacts, instead of just checking to see if it is there. If they can pause long enough to build pain, their solutions will be much more intriguing.