subject: Effective Sales Tactics - Magnify Uncovered Pain [print this page] Sales tactics can be used to create very productive conversations with prospects and identify which direction to go. One of those tactics is to magnify any pain that the prospect is experiencing that we identify through our discovery and discussions. Pain in this context is essentially the impact felt when something is not working well or could be working better.
If we are able to uncover pain the prospect is experiencing, we can then take that direction one step further by trying to determine the impact of the pain. Mapping out how the pain impacts the prospect at a technical, business, and personal level will provide valuable information.
If the impact Identified is noticeable or significant, we will then magnify the pain that we uncovered. Although on the other extreme, if we map out the impact and it is insignificant, we have also uncovered good information as this can help us to determine if the prospect or lead is qualified.
Real World Example
To go through a quick example of how sales tactics like this work, we will use a scenario of a doctor talking to a patient where knee pain has been uncovered.
Magnifying Pain
Once the pain is discovered, the doctor could make assumptions as to how the pain is impact the patient's life and think it is a medium level inconvenience. But if he goes on to ask the patient how the knee pain is impacting her, he goes on to learn that the pain has prevented the patient from the routine of running every morning.
And by this change in routine, there have been major changes in the patient's life in terms of physical and mental health. These changes are having a ripple effect to impact the patient on both a professional and personal level in terms of relationships. By mapping out the impact of the pain, the doctor not only learned a tremendous more about what the patient is experiencing and this magnified the pain that was originally discovered.
Minimizing Pain
But let's look at the other extreme of that example and these sales tactics. Let's say that the doctor begins to assume that the knee pain is creating a medium level inconvenience and goes on to ask about the impact. After being asked about the impact of the pain, the patient goes on to share that it is no big deal really. She is still able to do everything that she wants to and is not too bothered by the pain.
In this scenario, instead of magnifying pain, the doctor actually minimized the pain and identified that there is not really much of an overall impact. This is very valuable information the doctor just identified that there is no need to treat something that they would have tried to treat if they moved forward based on their assumed impact.
The key takeaway here is that if we are able to magnify the pain, we can increase our momentum with that particular lead and prospect. On the other hand, if we are not able to magnify, then we actually end up minimizing the pain and this will tell us that it is not a qualified prospect and lead and we may want to consider moving on to spend our valuable time with a different prospect.
