It is a given that selling is unpredictable and one thing we can be sure of is we can use effective sales tactics to create increasingly productive conversations with prospects. Magnifying any pain in which we’re able to identify that the prospect is experiencing is one of those tactics. When using pain in this context, it refers to the impact felt when something isn’t working well or could be working better.
Attempting to determine the impact of the pain once the prospect’s pain is uncovered is one step further that we can take in using a sales tactic. By mapping out how the pain impacts the prospect at a technical, business, and personal level we are provided valuable information.
We’ll magnify the pain that we uncovered if the impact we identified is noticeable and/or significant. On the contrary, when we map out the impact and it is insignificant, we have also discovered valuable information because this helps us determine if the prospect is qualified.
Real World Example
We’ll use a scenario of a doctor speaking with a patient in which knee pain has been uncovered which is a quick example of how such effective sales tactics as this work.
Magnifying Pain
With the pain being discovered, the doctor may make assumptions as to how the pain has impacted the patient’s life and might think it’s a mid-level inconvenience. However, by asking the patient how the knee pain is impacting him, the doctor will learn that the pain has prevented the patient from their routine of running each morning. With this change in routine, there have been significant changes in the patient’s life in both their physical and mental health. These changes also impact the patient in both their professional and personal relationships. By the doctor mapping out the impact of the pain, she learned a large amount about what the patient was experiencing. In turn, this magnified the pain that was originally discovered, and this is a great example of how these sales tips work.
Minimizing Pain
Now, let’s take a look at the flip side of that example and these sales tactics. Instead, let’s use the example that the doctor draws an assumption that the knee pain is creating a mid-level inconvenience and continues to ask about the impact. After asking about the impact of the pain, the patient says that it’s no big deal to them really. He still has the ability to do everything he wants and isn’t significantly bothered by the pain. In this example, instead of magnifying pain, the doctor minimized the pain and identified the fact that there wasn’t much of an impact. This is valuable information the doctor identified because there isn’t a need to treat pain and the doctor might have tried treating it if they moved forward based only on assumed impact.
The important thing to learn from this in using sales tactics is that if we have the ability to magnify pain, we increase our momentum with that lead and prospect. On the contrary, if we don’t have the ability to magnify pain, we end up minimizing the pain. This will reveal that it isn’t a qualified prospect and we might want to consider moving on to spend our valuable time with a different prospect.
SalesScripter provides sales coaching helping sales pros to adopt effective sales tactics to improve results.