We’re all taught to dig for, find, and sell to pain. There’s nothing wrong with this approach other than the fact that people buy for pleasure, too. Most of us get stuck in the world of selling to pain when we sell to people below the “power line,” or to non-decision makers. These people are focused on today or on yesterday which leads to them being relatively short-sighted. They want to resolve 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 an idea of where they need to be which is usually marked with success and optimism. The beautiful thing about finding and tapping into this vision — selling to pleasure versus to pain — is that 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 in how and what questions you ask to those 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? Or What could be better? These are all necessary questions to ask at a certain stage of the sales process, but not when starting out.
Start the conversation about something that puts them in the position to be the expert and gets them talking. 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 these days. Ask open-ended questions about something you read on their website or about an annual report that has 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). For the next meeting you have with an executive see if you can come up with one pleasure and one pain question at a level higher than you’re used to and see what happens.
Make it happen.
