In today’s Tactic Tuesday, we are going to talk about how to get conversations centered around the prospect’s pain when B2B cold calling. Which might sound easy, but executing that can be tricky, and we will provide very clear tactics for how to do this in today’s session.
Talk About the Prospect’s Pain
I first began to think about the concept of pain in the mid-point of my career, when I was working as a salesperson at 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 talked about a lot of the psychology around selling, and one of the 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 start sharing 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. And that gap is what my company and the process I am showing you here help to fill.
You Want to Talk About Pain in a Specific Area
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.
You Need Pain Questions
In order to find out if the prospect has pain or challenges that your product or service can help to solve, you need to ask pain questions that align with your product or service. These are questions that check to see how things are going for the prospect.
Create a List of Pain Points
To have a good list of pain questions to ask, you need to create a list of pain points your product or service helps to solve. For each pain point, you can usually compose a question or two that can be asked to see how the prospect is doing in the area where your product fits.
Start with Your List of Benefits
A trick to help with creating your list of pain points is to look at the list of improvements your product or service delivers. There is a yin-yang relationship between your product’s benefits and pain points, because when you improve something, you help to avoid or solve a problem and pain point. With that, we can very easily look at the list of benefits and for each improvement, we can just think about what the opposite is for each improvement and use that to create a list of pain points.
Our Sales Message Brainstorming Process
These three steps are actually part of our sales message brainstorming process. You can either just go through these three steps, but if you want to do this correctly, we recommend going through the full process. The complete process will provide a full sales message, and each step of the process creates what we call building blocks. You can then use the building blocks to create a cold call script or call outline.
