When attempting to improve selling, one of the fastest ways to improve results is by improving your ability to find pain.  Pain means the impact felt when something isn’t working well or could be better.  It is important to effectively find out if things are great, okay, or could be better for the prospect in order to generate leads and identify which prospects it makes sense to keep speaking with.  In the situation where things are OK or could be better, pain could exist, and getting the conversation focused on this possible pain will return strong benefits.  Now, if things are great or if we’re not able to find pain, there are some very powerful factors that will go against everything that we attempt to do during cold calling.

 

Gets the Prospect’s Attention

While on a cold call, a very effective way to help establish the call and keep it moving forward is by getting the prospect’s attention and uncovering pain.  By making the pain of the prospect the center of the conversation, we greatly improve our likelihood of capturing and keeping the prospect’s attention.  On the other hand, by trying to establish a cold call when the topic of discussion is not connected to an area of pain or priority, we’re not going to create a conversation that is interesting and grabs the attention of the prospect.

 

Connection with the Prospect

We can increase our interactions by making people feel as though we understand what they’re attempting to say as well as understand where they’re coming from.  By being able to talk about a prospect’s pain during cold calls, we are communicating to them that we understand them.  When taking this minor step, we’re enabling ourselves to begin building connections and rapport with the prospect.

 

Collect Valuable Information

Get the cold call focused on the prospect’s pain in order to make the call more productive from an information-gathering standpoint. In turn, this will help to improve selling.  It doesn’t matter if the call doesn’t go anywhere as far as commitment or action.  What matters is that we’re able to gather key details regarding pain that’s being experienced in the organization or business, which means we’ll have made a more productive conversation because we can use this information in our strategy and in future communications, including conversations, presentations, proposals, etc.

 

Qualification

Everything is going well for the prospect if we’re not able to identify the pain that the prospect may be experiencing.  There will not be much motivation to make a change when things are going well.  When there’s no motivation to make changes, even if the prospect shows signs of any level of interest, the lead or opportunity may not be qualified.  While the prospect may be available to attend demos and meetings, when it comes time for them to commit or spend money, the deal may stall or not happen at all because there may not be enough motivation because of the lack of pain.  This shows that uncovering pain is a key step when qualifying the lead and prospect which helps to improve selling.

SalesScripter provides sales coaching helping sales pros to improve selling.