In marketing and sales, we hear a lot of talk about the importance of knowing our prospects “pain points” – the importance of identifying them, explaining how our services help relieve that pain, and describing what life will look like once that pain has been removed.
I believe there is an important difference between helping someone discover pain vs. trying to inflict pain on them. I write “inflict” with tongue in cheek, but sometimes I get the feeling that is what some people are trying to do when they are marketing and selling professional services.
So what’s the difference? When you are trying to help someone discover or define their pain, you are asking questions and listening. You are working with them to help them determine:
- Do they have a problem that you can help them solve?
- Is it important enough, relative to everything else going on in their business, to address this problem now?
- What is the cost of not fixing the problem? (another priority question)
- Are they willing and able to pay you to fix this problem for them?
When you are attempting to inflict pain, you:
- Are doing most of the talking and very little listening. You’re lecturing.
- You are focused on closing the sale (and it’s obvious)
- You are trying to convince them of the great deal they are getting.
Here is a real life example (the one that prompted my to write this post). I recently attended a webinar that promised to teach small business owners how to generate leads. The title of the webinar and the promotional email was filled with the typical marketing hyperbole, but since I like to give webinars about marketing, I thought I would attend to see what I could learn.
I was expecting to hear about some of the common challenges businesses face in generating leads, explanations about the underlying causes, and some direction on how to go about addressing those issues. In other words, I thought they would raise issues I could identify with (discover pain), explain how those issues might be addressed (explain, not solve), and paint the picture of what life would look like afterwards.
That’s what I was expecting. However, the message I received was “This is way too difficult and complicated. You’ll never get it right unless you hire us to tell you what to do. If you don’t hire us, you will fail.”.
Is this message really effective? I don’t know about you, but this language and tone makes my guard go up. In this case, I was on a webinar, there was no chance I was going to be buying anything, no chance they were going to ask me to buy. There was no need for me to feel threatened, but I could still feel myself resisting. I had to convince myself that I would learn something about what not to do in my webinars just to complete the webinar.
Now I’m sure you don’t purposely try to scare someone into buying your services. Sometimes we just don’t think about how our message is being received on the other side of the table, telephone, or computer screen. Reviewing the experience above made me realize at least 3 different things I need to do differently in my own webinars to avoid making similar mistakes.
How about you? Are you lecturing or collaborating in your sales and marketing conversations?
