As you learn the Sandler sales system, you will acquire a number of powerful techniques for establishing an authentic conversation about potential customer pain along with tools to sustain that conversation. When you assimilate these techniques in your work, you will close more sales. More on that later, but for now, let’s master and use those techniques and create a clear picture of what pain is (and is not) in the professional sales process. This is important because, unfortunately, most salespeople don’t have a practical understanding of what a potential customer’s pain is. Also, many salespeople have no idea why pain is the most important element in having successful sales calls and sales cycles, whether you are in a one-call closing or a 12-month sales cycle.
If pain is the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, like the car driver in the example I used in my last blog, you felt pain when you were ashamed of driving your junk down your own street. He was in pain when he realized he was not driving a safe vehicle. He felt pain when he was bothered by the loud noise the car was making. Anxious, embarrassed, and fearful for your own safety, you can be forgiven for wondering where the closest garage is so you can organize repairs.
Emotions fueled your desire to find a garage. When you start to examine any purchase, you will see that it all goes back to an original experience of pain within the customer’s emotions. At some point, the potential customer is in enough pain and looks for a solution, be it on an individual or business level. The potential client wants to heal their pain and needs. YOU to show how that can be done.
Here are three things I want you to remember when it comes to the subject of pain:
1. Pain is a deeply ingrained emotional need capable of forcing someone to buy something.
two. Pain makes closing a sale easier.
3. Pain is not the problem prospects have that they want to solve or fix. It is the gap between how they feel about the problem and how they would like to feel.
Remember, people buy emotionally and want their pain to end. That is why pain makes it easier to close a sale. Prospects logically justify decisions, but the decision to buy always begins with pain. The more pain prospects are in, the more likely they are to buy a solution and spend time, money, and resources eliminating their pain.
Main point: There is a direct relationship between how much pain prospects feel and how much they will invest to fix it. Pain is one of the most misunderstood sales concepts, but also one of the most powerful tools, once it is understood and taken advantage of.
Of course, people will argue that there is both an emotional and an intellectual component to a purchasing decision. However, if you look closely at any purchasing decision, you will find that almost always, everything in the buyer’s world begins with emotions. Therefore, every purchase begins with pain.
When I say, “Everything starts with pain”I mean that a situation elicits an emotional response, forcing a person to act, examine their options, and make a change. After all this, decision-making can shift to the intellectual side, but the emotional side is always the initial driving force. Engage your prospect’s pain and you’re taking a powerful step toward closing the deal.
BEYOND THE FEATURES AND BENEFITS
Salespeople are often taught to tell potential customers about the features and benefits of their product or service near the beginning of a sales call. I’ve mentioned how the emphasis on features and benefits misses the mark. Hope you can see why. Discussions about characteristics are not inherently emotional. Nor, contrary to popular belief, are there discussions of benefits. Appeals to features and benefits are basically intellectual exercises. No matter how much salespeople try to put “sizzle” into these discussions, they usually end up connecting with the logical part of the potential customer’s brain, not the emotional part. I contend that when a salesperson presents features and benefits up front without discovering the potential customer’s pain and a sale occurs, the potential customer has bought in spite of the feature and benefits presentation, not because of it.
The most effective way to get a potential customer emotionally involved is to have a meaningful conversation in which the potential customer reveals the pain and discusses it directly with the salesperson. With the purpose of relieve the pain, you gotta get the prospect relive the pain.