Diagnose the pain of your buyer prospects to discover the best remedy for them and increase your own sales efficiency and improve your sales process. The ability to gather and manage information around prospect’s needs is vital to work with buyers who are ready to purchase a solution. Extract valuable information from them and then engineer a plan to help relieve their pain.
Levels of Pain
Pain can be as simple as when something is not working as well as they would like…or it can be a pain so deep and complex that it keeps the prospect up at night in a cold sweat of worry. In order to effectively help your prospect and make a sale, it is important that you identify the pain and its level so you can improve your sales process.
Three Levels of Pain:
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- Technical Pain is when the system is not performing well or it is unreliable.
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- Business Pain is when it is affecting costs, revenue or customer satisfaction.
- Personal Pain often affects workload, compensation issues and job security.
Symptoms of Prospect’s Pain
Pain can show up in a number of ways. Anything from knowing that something could be working better, or errors being made within the business process, can cause pain. Asking questions to uncover the symptoms is vital to qualifying a buyer’s need.
Often the prospect is unable to tell you about their pain because they are in a state of denial. Just like the football player that has been injured may say he is all right, the prospect may tell you everything is fine because they want to get off the call and back into the game.
Other times the prospect is actually unaware of the pain. They are so busy working on the day-to-day operations that they don’t take time to recognize the pain of high costs, low revenue and errors in their processes. You can learn how to tease out awareness of the prospect’s pain by attending a free webinar on January 23, 2013. Register here and bookmark the page – we’ll post the video here after the webinar.
4 Tactics for Higher Quality Prospects
Carefully craft questions to sort and qualify your prospects. This tactic will allow you to spend more time with the ones who are ready to buy.
You might ask questions that will help the prospect rate their situation on a scale of 1-10. An example would be “How happy are you with the level of service from your current provider? Rate them on a scale one to ten.” Another tactic is to tell a true story that your prospect may identify as similar to their situation. You might even get the prospect to envision a magic wand that could eliminate challenges and ask what they would get rid of first.
If the prospect is unable or unwilling to reveal their pain, you may want to try a last resort to disqualify them with the affirmation, “It sounds like you all are doing pretty well.” Either the prospect will agree or deny the existence of pain when you say that. If you reach this point, you might want to thank the prospect for their time and move on. Accurately identifying someone who has no need for your product or service allows you to spend time with prospects that are ready to purchase.
Learn to use this powerful diagnostic tool for your business and increase the quality of your prospects. Learn a wide range of profit building methods by attending a series of Live Business Growth Webinars at no cost to you.
The second in our series is called “What’s in it For Me? Building a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Customer’s “Pain”. Don’t miss it!