4 - Probing For Pain

Sales people must focus on prospects pains that their product / service resolves, through probing

One way to have a great sales pitch and delivering value is that sales people must focus more on the prospect pain that they help to resolve or fix. And they can do that by asking the prospects powerful questions.

What is Pain?
Pain is basically what is not working well or could be working better for the prospect. While this could be something that is causing a disruption, it could also be an area where things are working OK but they could be working much better.

An important thing to keep in mind with prospect pain is that the prospect might not know that they have pain. Meaning there is something that is not working as well as it could be but the prospect has no awareness of this.

Why Pain Will Make a Great Sales Pitch
The reason that focusing more on prospect pain will greatly improve sellers pitch is that can be more attention grabbing for a prospect. If there is something that they are concerned about and sellers mention that topic or include details about that challenge in an email, they can greatly improve their chances of getting the prospect's attention.

Why Sales People Forget to Talk About Pain
It can be common for salespeople to forget to focus enough on prospect pain and the reason is very understandable. This can all be traced to the fact that they are compensated and rewarded when they sell the product / service in question.

As result, they end up talking mostly about their products/service and company when talking with prospects. They really have to go one step further beyond talking about their products to get pain into a conversation and this is when they start to get to a great sales pitch.

When to Include Pain in the sales Pitch?
Sales people can use prospect pain at many different times in their pitch. They can include some examples of points that they help to fix in their introduction, whether that is over the phone or face to face or in an email.

Sellers can also share some common pain points that they help to fix later in a good sales pitch when they feel like the conversation is not going anywhere or if they start to face some objections. When sellers hit a wall or don't know where to take a call, they can fall back to start asking some powerful pain questions.

How to Get More of a Focus on Pain
The first step to getting the sales pitch more focused on the prospect's pain is to figure out the key problems that the products/service help to fix or resolve. An important thing to note here is that the product/service may resolve different problems for the different buyer personas that sales people sell to.

Sellers can also use the pain points that their products/services help with to develop a great list of probing sales questions. For each problem, there could be one or two questions that they can ask to see if that prospect has the pain that they can help with and these questions will also help to make a great sales pitch.