Need or Pain RISK
Establishing Need(s) and Pain(s) is the key to successful modern sales.
In modern selling, we focus a lot on ensuring that we understand the business problem and, more importantly, understand the impact such problem or problems has on the business.
The process we used to uncover this is known as discovery and nearly all deals are won or lost on discovery. There are two dimensions to the discovery piece. The first is understanding what the customer believes they want to achieve. The customer will usually verbally outline to you what they want to achieve. The second part is where you add value as you build on what the customer has asked for and explore related relevant areas with them to see where you can add additional value. The second piece is vital for differentiating yourself from your competitors and adding differentiated value.
The discovery piece needs to understand real needs that are important enough to do something about. If the leads are weak or if your product fits to the needs is not strong you typically are in a poor position to conclude business.
The discovery phase also incorporates a number of other parameters. At this stage, we’re looking for the business consequences (and for some measurement of it), understanding the priority, willingness to resolve the issue(s), and access to the budget. Taken together, they constitute the discovery process of determining the problem and its impact.
We talk about a need or pain as a negative thing that the customer has. So customers looking to use your solution to improve the situation. The situation may already be good and they are just looking to make it better. It could be that they want to add new capabilities, and new offerings to their customers, which is positive, so problem determination doesn’t always mean negative.
Amplifying Factors Business Consequences, Priority
RED – Need or Pain Unknown Until we know the customer’s need/pain we are not in a strong position to present value to the customer and all we are doing is facilitating a purchase by the prospect. In these circumstances, the prospect is doing all the work and we have no control. |
AMBER – Need/Pain Indicated We need to build trust with prospect to enable them to feel comfortable sharing with us more detail of the need or pain. In circumstances where they indicated the problem area, it’s likely that they have more information so working around it with them is a great opportunity to build trust and show expertise. |
GREEN – Need/Pain Confirmed Establishing the need or pain is critical, and once you’ve established this or these pains, you need now to build on this and get more detail, understand the business impact, and some metrics to quantify this. |
Mitigations – What to Do ?
The discovery enables us to move the conversation from features to benefits. By establishing the pain/need or many cases, several pains, or several needs we can focus on the benefits of your solution rather than simply the features.
Differentiated value is critical. Once you establish the need or pain you need to take these away and think hard about how you can add value rather than simply reflect value based on the need or pain explained to you. The reason is that it’s likely the same need or pain has been uncovered by your competitors and so you can’t put yourself into a good position by simply reflecting value rather than adding value. In some situations you may be lucky that your brand power may be strong enough, the customer sees that difference, but more often than not, it prevents you from winning the deals.
Make sure you distinguish between needs and wants. The prospect you are dealing with may explain and describe to you items on their wish list that aren’t really needs. They are simply things that they would like to have or want to have. Making sure you understand the things that are really important.
In the discovery phase. You will often encounter issues described by the prospect around migrating from their current position to a new position. Be careful not to get stuck in the change process as opposed to the future final state. Yes, the change process is important, but not at this stage. You need to focus on the future state and make sure that the customer does the same or he can end up on a constant loop of how to get there rather than focusing on the positivity of the final result.
One thing the discovery is not is simply a mechanism to understand what to show the demo. I’ve often seen account executives listen to the customer and simply write down what they want and use this list as a guide of what to show in the demo and let the customer worry about the business benefits and impact. This is lazy selling and won’t win in highly competitive situations.
Curiosity or a curious frame of mind is how you need to approach understanding the need/pain. Listen intently to what you told and ask questions to probe deeper and further. By being curious, you will benefit both yourself and the prospect by uncovering the real needs.