Consultative selling: do you know how to increase your clients’ pain?

Now you must be thinking, this time you’ve gone crazy!

It might look that way.

But what do “pains” have to do with sales anyway?

It’s a technique that makes it possible to determine where our client’s “pains” are and use them in the sales process.

By pain, we mean all the problems, difficulties, or needs that the client has and that we as “doctors” can solve.

in sales, there are two specific approaches:

• To solve a real need;
• Create it.

Let’s look at the first option in this article.

In case we are working with needs or problems that the client has, two situations can arise.

The client has a problem or necessity identified or does not even know that he has a problem (which often happens).

It may also be the case that the client has a problem but is not aware that there is already a product or service on the market that solves it, this is precisely where our “medical” skills come in.

If you approach the customer and ask them:

“Mr. Client, do you have problem X here at your company?”

Do you think he’ll tell you?

A lot of times you won’t even admit you have a problem.

And it is here that this technique of increasing your clients’ “pain” comes into play.

It has four steps that allow us to validate whether the client suffers from that problem, to identify the problem, to characterize it in terms of costs, and consequently to present a solution to the client.

To do so, we must first focus on creating situation questions.

In other words, those perfectly innocent questions that can tell me whether this client is likely to suffer from a particular problem that my products or services solve.

For example, let’s imagine that our service XYZ achieves an average saving of 80% in production waste costs.

This service is ideal whenever customers have more than 22,000 production parts per month of a given product and use YZW production equipment.

Now to see if your customer could be a potential sick, what I would do would be to ask him a question to identify the two above conditions.

For example:

“We: Mr. Client, in terms of production, how many parts do you produce per month?”

“Patient: About 25,000.”

“We: And tell me something, Mr. Client, you use the YZW equipment as I thought I saw it on your production line, right?”

“Patient: Yes, in fact, they were acquired last year.”

Now that the client has indicated to us that he may indeed be a potential patient, we will have to move on to phase 2. Validate if he has any waste in the production system.

That could be as follows:

“We: Mr. Client, we have some clients with this equipment, they’re quite reliable. However, sometimes they have a slightly higher than average waste in the production process. Is this also the case with you?”

“Patient: Yes, indeed.”

Now that the client has confirmed that he suffers from the pain, we proceed to quantify the cost of it.

For example:

“We: Mr. Client, and more or less, how much waste is it?”

“Patient: Well, on average, since this varies depending on the type of product, it reaches 30%.”

We now have in hand the “disease” of the client and its implications.

In this case, it is a percentage that affects production systems, but it could be other factors, such as hours/man, financial costs, in short everything that can be on of the operation.

By having the costs, although not quantifiable, we are now prepared to propose a solution.

However, it is prudent to take another validation step so that we can “elevate” our patient’s “pain” even further.

We should, therefore, validate with him whether it would make sense to present a proposal.

This can as follows:

“We: Mr. Client, you told me that the waste was up to 30%. If we could find a solution that would lower the waste on your production line by 80%, would that be interesting for you?”

“Customer: Yes, it does sound interesting, but how do you do that?”

From here we are in the field of presentation of our product or service and corresponding proposal.

When we present a proposal, we already have from the client his connection to a specific “pain” that, given the cost it has, will have to be solved.

In this way, our proposal ends up is justified in terms of the return that the client will obtain.

Next time you have a sales meeting, think about this:

Prepare this process, and you will see how your chances of leaving the meeting with a proposal will be much higher.

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Also published on Medium.