This is module three in the SMART Sales System sales training program. In this video, we will talk about how to use pain points to generate leads and sell more.
Focus on the Prospect’s Pain
I first learned about the concept of pain points at the mid-point of my career, when I was working as a salesperson at a company called BMC Software. Before that, all the training I had received was primarily product training – this is what you sell, this is how it works, and so on.
But BMC brought in an external sales training company, and I found their training to be fascinating. They discussed many aspects of the psychology behind selling, and one of the key concepts they focused on was pain. And the angle was that, in order to sell a product, first find the pain the prospect is having, and then introduce your product as the solution to their needs. I found this training incredibly interesting and could not wait to get back to my desk to start calling my prospects and talking about their pain.
Talking About Pain Is Not Easy
But when I got back to my desk after the training and started calling prospects, I figured out pretty quickly that it is not easy to get a prospect, especially a cold prospect, to open up and share their challenges and pain points. I knew where I wanted conversations to go, but it was not clear how to get them there.
And I actually believe this is where the training company and the company I was working for fell short. It was great that they taught me to talk about pain, but there is a gap remaining in how to do that. They did not teach what to say and ask to get conversations centered around the topic of pain. We help to fill that gap and make it clear what you need to say and ask in order to get conversations centered around the prospect’s pain, and that is what I will explain in this video.
Talk About the Pain You Fix
The first step is to have complete clarity around what we are trying to do. We want the prospect to talk about their challenges and pain points. But we do not want them to talk about any or all of their problems.
If you sell marketing services, you don’t want the prospect to talk about challenges they are having in the area of HR. This is why the questions of “What is your biggest challenge?” and “What keeps you up at night?” are not great.
You want the conversation and focus to be on the area your product fits, and to uncover the pain points and challenges that exist in that area.
Identify the Pain You Fix
If you want to improve your ability to uncover pain in the area where your product fits, you need to have clarity around the pain points your product or service can help to solve. And that is what the next step in our sales message brainstorming process will help with, because it will help us to create an optimized set of pain points to talk about for the product we are selling and the audience we are communicating with.
And one of the ways it is able to do that is because we bring back the value points we created on the last step, and can use these to create our optimized set of pain points. This is because, for each improvement our product delivers, there is an opposite problem that is either resolved, minimized, or avoided.
With that, we can look at each improvement and ask ourselves, “What is the opposite of that improvement?” or “What problem goes away or is avoided if we create that improvement?” This process will help us to create a good list of pain points that we can help with and should be looking for.
