Hey, Scott from The Sales Mastermind here. Today’s edition only takes 3 minutes to read.
Buyers will rarely volunteer anything beyond surface pain.
Without getting to Deep Pain, most deals will end in a whimper. The buyer will think, "Yea, it sucks… but I have 100 other priorities, and this isn't the top 3."
Today we’ll cover
- Moving beyond surface pain
- Understanding your childhood programming
- And a set of questions to quantify the Deep Pain
My daughter is a great sleeper (by baby standards). She sleeps for ~12 hours most nights.
Now and again, she doesn't.
The fix might be as simple as entering her room and giving her a dummy. Other times, we gently soothe her back to sleep.
Occasionally, nothing will get her to stop screaming except a squirt of baby Panadol.
At a guess, I would say the breakdown is something like:
- 90% Dummy-only
- 8% Soothing
- 2% Panadol
And in the Deep Pain, "2% Panadol", I would pay almost any cost to help her sleep.
Surface Pain
Most nights are either dummy-only or soothing.
When my wife and I are asked, "How did the baby sleep?"
Our answer is, "Mostly great; sometimes it's a struggle, but not last night."
Dummy-only or soothing are not, to us, a problem. At least not enough to take action.
Elite sellers know they must ask more questions to get to the Deep Pain.
Yet, some sellers will hear "struggle" and think there is an opportunity.
These sellers often ask one pain question, maybe two, and accept whatever the buyer says as justifying a buying journey.
These sellers get stuck on surface pains.
Moving Beyond Surface Pain
Elite sellers get beyond the surface pain.
They relentlessly seek out Deep Pain, such as when my daughter is in distress, and we give her Panadol.
Elite sellers ask why. Then, ask why again.
And keep asking why, maybe rephrase it, until the buyer responds with a Deep Pain worth solving.
Elite sellers become the stereotypical incessant child who keeps asking.
Fight your Childhood Programming
When I was younger, I would ask, "Why?" too many times.
My late grandfather used to respond: "Because Y is a crooked letter, and you can't keep it straight."
It's a story similar to that of many adults.
They were overly curious about the world. Then, family, friends, and teachers trained them not to ask so many naive questions.
Elite sellers revert to their childhood state to uncover Deep Pain.
Deep Pain
The hardest part of getting to real, deep, pains is that people and companies all have different priorities and levels of pain tolerance.
One company, in the process of international expansion, may ignore anything but the most dire of pains in the home market/s.
Another company, in the process of trying to find an acquirer, may be laser-focused on anything to improve gross margins.
When elite sellers probe for pain, they also validate it is a Deep Pain. Otherwise they keep digging or change tact.
Questions to get to pain
Pain questions come in three forms:
- Opening questions - to get the conversation started
- Probing questions - to get deeper, and
- Confirmation questions - to ensure you've uncovered something worth solving
Opening questions
- (Inbound) If you don't mind me asking, what recently changed that made you reach out to us?
- (Outbound) If you don't mind me asking when you booked this meeting via cold call/email/other, what was the prompt? Of all the things you could be doing with your time, why take this meeting?
- Help me understand: what was the trigger for our meeting?
- From your website/annual report/other calls/etc, it appears the current strategic initiative is ABC. Was that the impetus for this meeting?
Pushing Deeper Questions
- How did you come to that conclusion?
- What metric are you using to judge success or failure?
- How do you know that's an area to focus on?
Confirmation Questions
- I might have missed something; it feels like we've strayed from ABC. How are these things related?
- Until now, the business has been operating fine; why is ABC enough of a problem right now to do something about it?
- If nothing changed, and you stayed operating as you were, would that be the worst thing in the world? Why make ABC a priority today?
If you take nothing else away from today's newsletter, ask one question deeper on your next sales call.
Just one.
Then, see how your buyers respond and see the magic of getting to Deep Pain.
Until next week,
Scott Cowley
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