Lesson 41 - Implicate the Pain

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Sales success often hinges on helping prospects understand the cost of their current challenges, creating the necessary urgency to make a change. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to implicate the pain effectively during discovery and presentations. Your assignment will involve crafting a narrative that highlights a prospect’s pain and connects it to your solution.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you'll learn to dig into the pain that your prospects are facing. Tie this pain to impacted business outcomes and use specific techniques to make this pain so real and so urgent that your prospect is compelled to take action. Now, let's start by understanding what pain means in the context of the med pick framework. In the context of this framework, pain refers to the specific problems, challenges or obstacles that your prospect is facing. And this could be anything. This could be operational inefficiencies. It could be missed, revenue targets, lengthy product delays, high employee turnover, the list goes on and on, but the important part is that you can't just identify the pain. You can't just uncover what the pain is. You need to tie that pain directly to a business impact that the economic buyer directly cares about. And as we recall from our previous lesson, there are three business impacts. They care about increasing revenue, decreasing costs and mitigating risk. So you have to tie their pain back to one of those three things, revenue. How is their pain preventing them from achieving revenue targets or missing growth opportunities cost. How much is their pain costing them when it comes to time, money or resources or productivity? And then finally, risk? What potential risks does this pain expose them to? Could it impact their market position there, make them less competitive, hurt their reputation with customers, or impact their long term sustainability. Once you've tied their pain to business impact, you need to implicate that pain in a way that makes it urgent your your prospect. Can't just see this as a challenge they need to solve. They need to see this as a challenge that they need to solve right now. They need to see that every day they wait, they are losing revenue, increasing costs or paying unnecessary costs. They're adding additional risk to their business. They need to understand the cost of delaying, not just the cost of not solving their problem. So what are some techniques that we can use to implicate the pain? Some of these techniques, I'm going to give you three. Some of these were taken from Daniel Pink's master class on persuasion. I would highly recommend you looking into Daniel Pink's master class on sales and persuasion. There's far more detail there. Daniel is incredible at delivering it. The first technique leverages the concept that less is more. You don't want to get in front of your prospect and start listing off 1015, 20 different pain points that they need to address that can be really overwhelming for them. What you need to do is hyper focus on the one or two pain points that are making the biggest impact today. So simplification, right? Don't present a giant list of problems. Present a single compelling consequence of inaction, and that will help them digest and understand what they need to do. So an example of this, if I worked for Sprout Social, might be something like Emily, right now your team is spending a significant amount of time managing all of your social media accounts manually, which is leading to decreased engagement rates. If this continues, you're going to miss out on potential customers who will end up engaging with your competitors. Instead, think about the revenue impact if even a small percentage of those lost engagements turn into lost sales, especially when your peak season is coming up in just two months, it is incredibly important that you act on this quickly. So what have I done there? I basically talked about the time managing social media accounts, the decreased engagements rates, engagement rates, and how that leads to lost revenue and potential competitive loss. Now, the second technique leverages the concept of opportunity cost. You may have heard of opportunity cost. This is the cost of not taking action. This is what the prospect is missing out on by not making a decision. See, a lot of customers are afraid to make large investments. They will look for literally any reason not to act. So you need to show them that deciding not to act is a negative decision. You need to show them the cost of inaction. So here's an example, Jessica, I completely understand that you've been managing your social media accounts with your current tool, and it's been working okay for you so far. Are, but have you considered what you might be missing out on by not upgrading to a platform like Sprout Social right now, your team is spending hours manually scheduling posts, tracking engagement and creating reports, which is not only time consuming, but it makes it harder to pivot based on performance. There's a cost to continuing down this path, lost growth, missed engagement opportunities, even the risk of falling behind your competitors who are leveraging more advanced social media strategies. So while staying with your current approach might seem like the safe option, not making a change means missing out on a huge opportunity to elevate your brand's social presence and drive real business results. So notice what I've done there. I've talked about the cost of inaction. The third technique involves asking your prospect a simple but powerful question on a scale of one to 10, how inspired are you to make a change. Now, the goal of this question is to get the prospect reflecting on how ready they are to change what they're doing today. And honestly, the number that they answer with doesn't really matter. It just needs to be higher than one. So chances are they might say, well, on a scale of one to 10, maybe we're at a four or five or six or a seven, but the follow up is what makes this so powerful. You're going to follow up by saying, okay, so you say that you're at a four. Let me ask you this. Why was your answer? Not one. Why are you motivated more than a one to make a change. And the goal of that follow up is to get them talking about all of the different reasons that they want to make a change. It gets them reflecting on their own reasons for reaching out, for taking your call, for discussing a change at all. Using these three techniques will absolutely help you to implicate the pain and motivate your prospect to act all right. Now it's your turn for today's assignment. You're going to list the three most common pain points your customers face. You're going to tie each of these pain points to revenue, cost or risk, and then, more importantly, you're going to write down an example of how you can deliver each of the three techniques we discussed in today's lesson. The less is more technique, the opportunity cost technique, and the How motivated are you? One to 10 technique, you'll review your notes with a peer mentor, manager, new hire buddy. Practice applying these techniques, practice delivering these responses in a mock sales conversation. And yeah, I mean, the more you practice, the better you're going to be at delivering this in a powerful, impactful way. Your study guide is going to walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota, thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye. You.