WRITTEN ON July 25th, 2011 BY John
We’re all taught to dig for, find and sell to pain. There’s nothing wrong with this approach other than the fact that sometimes we don’t pick our head up and realize sometimes (a lot of times) people buy for pleasure reasons as well. The main reason most of us are stuck in the world of selling to pain is because unfortunately most of us get stuck selling to people below the “power line,” or to non-decision makers. These people are focused on today or yesterday which leads to them being relatively short sighted and focused on resolving the issues affecting them in the short term. On the contrary, decision makers or people above the power line are more focused on the future. If you’re talking to a CEO or C level executive that doesn’t have a vision for where they are trying to go in the next 5 years I would be very concerned about their business. Fortunately most of them do have a vision of where they need to go which is usually marked with success and optimism. The beautiful thing about finding and tapping into this vision is if you can show them how your solution will help them get there then the discussions about price, competition and other core sales challenges become a lot less significant.
The best way to uncover the ‘pleasure’ side of any sale is through how and what questions you ask to the people in power. Obviously one of the biggest challenges is getting an audience with these people in the first place. However, once you do, make sure you don’t dive into your typical “doctor check-up” questions like: What do you do for this? How many of that do you have? How happy are you with your current solution? What could be better? These are all necessary questions to ask at a certain stage of the sales process, but not to start with. Start the conversation about something that puts them in the position to be the expert and gets them talking – THEMSELVES. People love talking about themselves and if you can do your research and come up with some good questions about their business, their industry and their role you’d be amazed at what people will tell you. Make sure you never say something like “So tell me about your business.” That’s insulting based on how much information is out there about companies these days. Ask open ended questions about something you read on their web site or annual report that has something to do with how your solution can help them. Also, a good way to think about pleasure versus pain questioning is to talk about “opportunities” (pleasure) versus “challenges” (pain).
To make the point even further, take a look at one of the more recent reports from Gartner entitled “Current States and Future Directions of the IT Industry.” In the report it talks about the changing priorities and focus of CIOs. Over the past 2-3 years we have all felt the ‘painful’ effects of the economy which has forced many CIOs to focus on cost cutting and doing much more with much less (i.e. pain). However, it’s pretty clear there’s a shift going on right now for CIOs and what their focus is going to be in the coming years. According to the report in the next five years a large portion of most CIOs compensation is going to be based not on how much they can save, but how much they can make. They are now being tasked with finding way to use technology to make money for the company and open up new revenue streams. I’m not sure about you but this sounds a lot more pleasurable to me. So, in my humble opinion, if you want to keep talking about budget and cost cutting to CIOs then get ready to face the pain of discounts. On the other hand, if you can shift the conversation to talk about how your solution can help them find ways to make money either directly or indirectly get ready for a hell of a lot more pleasurable conversations and more enjoyable, longer term, less price sensitive, more competitive proof sales. Good luck. Stay optimistic, it helps.
