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Your time is precious. And you want more successful sales meetings. You’ve been told to “focus on the pain”. And you’ve been doing just that.
The problem is – it hasn’t worked so far. But don’t worry: it isn’t you. It’s your focus.
You see, successful sales meetings depend on your ability to answer two basic questions that will engage and excite your prospect. Two questions that relate directly to two basic human drives.
Finding the pain.
Most of the time, when you’re meeting with potential clients, you will find that, for the most part, they have already identified their “pains” . They’re pretty well aware of what’s wrong, and they’d rather talk about what’ll happen when they “get it right”.
But, in spite of all the doctor/salesperson analogies, you’re not a doctor. Your only job is not to find “what’s wrong”, and then fix it. You are a business developer, and your job is to excite your client by painting a clear picture in two dimensions, not one.
Discovering pleasure.
Highlighting the pain is essential, but not enough. Most people are driven by two fundamental, human emotions:
1. Getting rid of pain
2. Maximising pleasure
At RAIN Group, we call the first group “afflictions” (things that people want to move away from) and the second “aspirations” (things that people want to move towards).
On the whole, as you sell up the corporate ladder, you’ll find that senior executives are much more driven by aspirations than by afflictions. Shifting your focus from “what should be fixed” to “what could be better” is likely to dramatically increase your effectiveness in selling to senior executives. And pretty much anyone else who gets more excited about building stuff than fixing stuff.