How to Find Pain in Sales. What Is Pain in Sales?

Lane 0:11
Hey, Lane. Hey, Rob,

Rob 0:13
how are we doing?

Lane 0:13
Doing? Great. How are you?

Rob 0:15
I’m doing well. I’m glad we both showed up at the same time. This is good. This is good. A good start. Good start,

Lane 0:20
same Same time, same place.

Rob 0:22
Yeah, that’s right. So we want to talk about today?

Lane 0:24
Well, I hear a lot of talk about pain. You know, I don’t think I’m supposed to kick people in the shin or something like that.

Rob 0:30
Oh, why not? It’s fun.

Lane 0:31
Well, you know, it, it probably leads to a bad first impression is what I’m thinking, I tend to focus more on features of benefits when I’m talking to somebody. So I’m really trying to understand what what what we’re talking about with pain, three things really come to mind. How do I figure out what pain points are? How do I structure my pitch to focus on pain rather than the features and benefits of what I’m selling? And if pain is really important, are features and benefits, not important?

Rob 0:57
Those are actually really good questions. And I would be willing to bet a lot of people out there probably thinking the same thing, because I’ve heard of the features and benefits as well. And I’ve also heard of the pain thing. So which way is the right way? Maybe we should talk about that. Let’s talk about pain and what that means and how to figure that all out. By the way, if you’re new here, I’m Rob. And I’m Lane. And today, guess what? We’re going to talk about pain. So let’s get started.

V/O 1:20
This is the slow pitch podcast.

Rob 1:24
Alright, so your questions really come down to what the heck does pain mean? I don’t even understand what that means. And I kind of started out the same way, I was told one time by somebody that paint is really important. You need to get paid when you go to do sales. And I was like, What are you talking? I don’t know what that means? Like? I thought the same thing as you’d like, do I kick him in the shins or not? I don’t know. And hopefully, by the end of this episode, we will talk about how to figure out what pain is. And then how do you structure pain questions? Or how do you focus on things so that they’re really focused around your features and benefits, and how that relates to pain. And then if pain is really important, which is I’m here to tell you, how important are the features and benefits. And if you don’t have the pain, I’m gonna say one thing that’s really kind of important for everybody understand is, is that if you don’t have pain, you don’t have a sale, I don’t care. You can try to force it. But it’ll never come. So make sure you understand the one rule that I always have is if you don’t have pain, you don’t have a sale. Just you don’t have that. So

Lane 2:26
I just want to kind of point out that, you know, every week we do this, I have a lot of pain.

Rob 2:33
Why do you have a lot of pain doing this?

Lane 2:36
Well, I have to sit here and listen to you, Rob. So

Rob 2:40
Fantastic. Well, that concludes this episode. All right. So I have a question for you Lane. Have you ever gotten to the point of actually writing an estimate? reviewing it, maybe thinking you have a sale? And then at the end, you kind of found out? Oh, they’re not gonna buy? Well, Rob, my

Lane 3:02
note here says I have to say yes to this. But in reality, yes, yes. And it happens all too often.

Rob 3:10
That that’s the best part is once you get to that point, that’s how you know you didn’t get pain. And by then it’s too late. So while it says you have to say yes, it and the reality is, is that if you didn’t get paid along the way, you’re not going to have the sale, when you get to that sale part. So what you’re going to want to do is, before you write the estimate, you’re going to find out whether or not you have the pain or not. Let’s get into the meat of this. So where do you want to start? I mean, of all this stuff that we just talked about, where would you want to start laying?

Lane 3:40
Well, I feel like we have to go, go, go start with the basics. You know, what is pain? What does it mean?

Rob 3:46
Yeah. Alright, so basically, when you go through pain, the whole premise of this is I just want you to imagine you’re, you have a car. It’s kind of a complicated car. It’s a or it’s a little temperamental, maybe. And you have a British sports car, a little British sports car. Yeah. You bring it in. The mechanic says, All right, let me take a look at it. Right. And they go back into the back and, and what do they do?

Lane 4:12
there? They eat a doughnut, they have a cup of coffee, probably I bang on something with a hammer make themselves some busy. Right? And then they come back and they say, Oh, this is gonna be really expensive. This is really complicated.

Rob 4:25
That’s right, they come back and they go, we’ll go fix this up real nice here. We’re gonna fix it up. And that’s not what you want to hear when they just went back there and ate a doughnut. Bang, done a few things. You know what they’re banging on. They could have damaged more stuff in your car, right? All right, for all you mechanics out there, probably not what happens. What probably happens is they they typically will hook the car up, they’ll want some diagnostics, they’ll run some tests, right? They want to know what’s causing the problem. And so they start working on narrowing down some of those issues. If they come back and they bring a printout, or they bring you back to the Back area and they start to show you all the cars hooked up, they show you this machine. For example, let me give you a good example I bought a car, and I knew I needed to get an alignment, because I just put a new tires, that place that put on new tires wasn’t able to do the alignment part, because that’s not what they do. And there’s a lot of story behind that. So I brought it to the mechanic that I know. And and they specialize in tires and all kinds of stuff, right? So they looked at the car and said, All right, I can fix the alignment. But here’s what the problem is, one of the struts is not really in good shape, but it’s too soon to replace it, it doesn’t have to be replaced yet, it’s going to be fine, everything can run fine, but you’re still gonna after a little while after I fix everything and get it all lined up, you’re still going to have a little bit of a pull to one direction or another. Just know that when does that over time when you get to your mileage that it gets to where you have to replace your struts, that’ll be the time to do it, we’ll fix that then you won’t have that pole anymore. Now, to me, I walked in thinking I’m just gonna have an alignment, which cost me x. And then he says, we could fix all these other things, right? So if he wants me to fix it, because that was the other option, then he says, or I can just replace your struts. Now. Well, fixing the alignment, and fixing the struts are two different things. So there’s a whole bunch of extra stuff that could come up price wise, cost wise, I wasn’t ready to spend all that and nor was he really gonna sell all that to me. So for me when you go to a mechanic, and they walk out and say we’re gonna fix your car, but they haven’t done any tests, that makes me feel like I haven’t. I don’t feel like you’ve really done what you said you would do. You don’t even appear to be fixing it, you have appeared to work on it, you have no idea. And to me, I don’t know that you actually know what’s wrong with my car, right? But when they come back and say, Okay, here’s the test, here’s the here’s what we found. This is the issue, we’ve pinpointed it to this one or two parts, those things need to be replaced right now or your problem was not going to go away. And or could cause further damage. Then at that point, lane, how much? If it says it’s gonna cost you $5,000? How much are you willing to spend to fix that problem? Or are you willing to let it go on forever?

Lane 7:06
Depending on the the value of my car, I guess I see what my pain is. And I have to make that choice of Am I going to put that investment in this car? Is it worth it? Or am I better off just let’s say trading the car away?

Rob 7:17
Right now? What if What if when you went in there, they said, Listen, your airbag is one of these defective ones needs to get replaced. And then you have these brakes that we found are not really good either. There’s another problem with your brakes too, by the way. And we found that your steering is off, they find all these extra things that you didn’t even know were wrong. But these are real issues that are problems in the price isn’t so exorbitant that you go Holy cow, it’s just worth it for me to replace the car. It’s like it’s a pain. But if your car let’s say your car’s worth, because I know you make a lot of money. And let us say your car,

Lane 7:54
your funds are here.

Rob 7:56
Let’s say your car is worth $80,000. Because I know that’s the kind of guy you are you just you drive big, big fancy cars, right? And let’s say the mechanic says, Listen, it’s gonna cost $8,000 to fix these problems. It’s an $80,000 car, you have to go buy another car right? Now make those numbers work the same way no matter what 10% you got to have those things fixed. Or you have safety issues. Are you going to pay? Let’s say 10% of the what you paid for your car to get those fixed? Or are you gonna let them go on?

Lane 8:26
know if they took the time they did the test, they they figured out exactly what’s going on. I’ve got a degree of trust there where I’m gonna go ahead and probably pull the trigger and get the work done.

Rob 8:35
Right. So you weigh out the costs and kind of how serious it is to safety. Yep, you’re measuring all these pieces? And hey, do I just replace the car? That’s another option for anybody, right at any point in time. Even if you have an $80,000 car like lane, you could technically you could just buy another one lane. I mean, I know you, you could probably do that if you want. The point is, is are five of my girls. Yeah, that’s what I thought. The point is, is that how much is it going to cost versus how much the replacement is? In that case? If it was your health, if it was anything else, like if you another good example, if your house needs to have a new roof because there’s six leaks in the roof, right? how willing are you to put up with those leaks and have other issues come up? versus Alright, we’re gonna have to spend 1000s and 1000s of dollars to have this whole roof replaced. Yeah, there’s options there. Right. But if you have a roofer that comes in and goes, looks from your driveway and goes, Hey, there’s a roof that you’re saying it leaks. Oh, okay. It’s gonna cost this much to replace it. And they go, it’s $20,000 to replace that roof and you’re like, what? 20? How do you figure 20,000? What are you doing? Yeah,

Lane 9:41
yeah.

Rob 9:42
But then the other guy comes in he goes, show me the leaks. They look at the leaks. They look around. They see they’ve found here’s where one leak came in. Here’s where another leak came in. For six of them, okay, they find four of the six. And then they say to you, it’s not where it’s leaking that the issue is it’s where it’s coming in. And seeping in. So you could have a leak over here. But it’s showing up where you’re seeing it now, right? Right, all those scenarios, you’ve got somebody that’s actually taking the time to evaluate, right? All of that is the point of pain. When you find enough pain for somebody, you now have the ability to think to yourself as the buyer, how much is this worth me to just continue on? Or should I just get it replaced? Because it’s worth it for me to get replaced and not have to deal with that headache as it is that pain is that offset? Right? So in the case of the roof, if you have six leaks, could they repair all six leaks? Yes, they could. How much is that? versus getting a new roof? And then you know, alright, if I’ve got a six leaks, I’ve had those replaced at $1,000 a leak. I’m at $6,000. But I haven’t replaced my roof. How many more leaks do you think are going to show up? Yeah. If you haven’t asked that question of yourself already. A good roofer should ask that question. They should say, well, they’re six already. How many more? Do you think are gonna show up? Just curious, what do you think? Where do these come last? So all of those questions that have to do with knowing what the person’s head is at. So when we talk about what is pain, it’s really that difference between what they want, and what they need, versus what you have to sell. The second part of that is, is structuring your pitch to features and benefits versus pain. You asked about that? How do I do that? I would reverse what you’re doing from being about pitching somebody to asking them questions, I would ask them questions about the features and benefits that you offer, but first structured in a way that frame around what the problem is, and what the features and benefits are that support it. So if you have a leaky roof, those questions about how many leaks do you have now? Does it only happen when it’s raining really hard? Or does it happen? Even if it’s a light sprinkle? How many of these Do you want to have repaired? Do you want to replace the whole roof? Why would you want to replace the whole roof? Like I would make the if I’m a roofing guy I would make the buyer explained to me why a new roof is better than just repairing it. Why would I do that Lane?

Lane 12:12
It sounds like you’re really trying to get the customer to talk themselves into why they need to replace rather than repair?

Rob 12:20
Well, yeah, I think it also helps me understand how important it is to them how serious it is to them. And if that hasn’t even entered their thought process that they’re going to have to replace, then that’s a different conversation I need to have, right. So think of it as if they know they have six leaks, but they go I don’t want to spend 20,000 on replacing this thing. I’ve just want to patch it. Okay. Now I need to ask some more questions about why patching it versus replacing it. I might ask you want to repair that. But there’s six of them. How often are they showing up? And they might say, you know, this is the sixth one came in just last week. Okay, what was the time before that? was about a month ago? Oh, okay. And before that, I was about three months before that. Oh, what do you think the next one is going to show up? Like, I’m just curious when how fast this has been happening? Seems like there’s a trend now. Yeah, what did something happened? Did something hit your roof? Did you do somebody walk up there, you know, there’s a whole bunch of questions you could ask to help them walk themselves through. So when you’re going to structure instead of a pitch, you’re going to structure your sales call, you’re going to structure it as if you’re knowing what your features and benefits are. So for a roofer, your your features and benefits are going to be, you know, we’re going to be it’s going to be secure, really tightly, it’s going to be watertight, you’re gonna have water dripping all the time, whatever the features and benefits are, and you can talk about reflecting the sun, keep the heat out you can have the snow is gonna fall off if you’re in a cold climate, whatever that is. Your questions have to revolve around that. So how important is it to have a reflective surface to keep the sun and the heat off your roof so that your house is cooler during the summertime? How important is that? Not important, okay, not a problem. I understand. There’s different ways to go through that, right. That’s how you’re going to structure it. So from a mechanic’s standpoint, like we were talking earlier, you know, they’re going to their benefits and features, you know, we’re gonna make it shiny, and we’re gonna make it clean, and we’re gonna do all these different things. Okay, that’s all great, who cares? what my problem fixed? And that’s what people really want when they’re calling you for a sale, right? If they’re, they’re calling you to buy. They’re calling you because they have a problem. They want it fixed. Right?

Lane 14:30
Yep, no, or

Rob 14:31
the other reason they might call you is they want something better in the future. So like, if you’re the roof person, the next time it rains, I don’t want to raining inside the house, right? That’s the benefit. That’s the pain that they have or the the opposite of pain, which is more of like, here’s the desire that they have. That’s in the future. They want to get there. And that distance becomes that pain distance. That’s what’s going to cause them to either buy or not buy.

Lane 14:58
Right. Yeah, that makes sense,

Rob 15:00
when we come back, let’s see if Lane can come up with, let’s say three questions that he might ask that kind of are based on his features and benefits to know if there’s pain, so that if he knows if he has got pain, then he can actually possibly make a sale. So we’ll be right back.

V/O 15:18
Do you have a question about sales? call or text your question at 60870? Wait slow, that’s 608-788-7569. Or you can email them to questions at the slow pitch calm. Now, back to the show.

Rob 15:39
Now, let’s find out whether or not Lane has come up with his three pain based questions, but also based on his features and benefits. So it’s switching his features and benefits around to find out if there’s pain. So about website development notes here ready to go?

Lane 15:55
I Rob? Well, in that 12 seconds we had right there. I think I have a couple seconds.

Rob 15:59
A few questions that that came to mind. It’s good thing we paused. So everybody, you know, so yeah, lane took about 16 minutes to write this. We’ve been

Lane 16:10
off seconds. 12 seconds. Have you noticed people visiting your site, but you’re not getting leads or purchases. And that

Rob 16:19
features and benefit would be what that you’re trying to what you’re trying to understand like you this is a feature that you have as what

Lane 16:27
you’re the future benefit would be you know, are you it’s gonna come down to the copywriting and the content and if someone literally has on their website, car run faster, if you’re a mechanic, you’re probably not going to get a lot of sales, right. But if you if you know if your your detailing what you can actually do for someone, we’re gonna run these diagnostic tests, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna, our 17 point diagnostic test to tell you what’s going on.

Rob 16:52
Yeah. And that really, then you find out what their pain is, which is they’re not converting i think is what you’re saying. You’re not you’re not converting visitors. Okay. So that’s a good question. Because if you know the answer to that, now, you can ask further questions about that issue. Like, maybe that’s not important to them. So maybe if you just follow that question with, and and if they said, yes, you could say, Okay, well, is that something you want to fix? And if they said, No, that’s not a problem. You could say, All right. And now, you know, that’s not an issue. So you start to determine where your pain points are on their side. So do you have another question?

Lane 17:30
Yeah, and the another question would probably be along the lines of, do you notice your website loading slowly?

Rob 17:35
Okay. So feature benefit would be?

Lane 17:38
Well, a lot of the commodity web hosting companies, you know, your website’s just load slow, and people complain about it all the time. And, you know, the search engines, they now they care about how quickly sites layout. So if you’re noticing your site loading slowly, that can very well be lead to other problems. Yep. And the pain then is, yeah, that’s, that’s gonna impact you know, your search engine placement that’s going to impact people sitting there looking at your site going, Oh, I’m gonna go Look, look elsewhere, because the site loads so slowly.

Rob 18:11
And then you have follow up questions, you can obviously ask once you get the answer to that, if they say no, that’s not an issue. Move on. Right. Okay. Right. Yep. And what’s your third question?

Lane 18:22
Another question I might ask. You know, sometimes people will they, they’ll, they’re complaining that they’ve been, you know, they’re they just have a lot of problems with their site, typically, WordPress sites, things like that. So sometimes I’ll ask, you know, are you aware of your site being hacked? Or have you run into problems with keeping WordPress up to date? For me, security is a really important piece of, of maintaining sites. And if you’re letting WordPress or plugins get out of date, you’re leaving yourself open to be hacked.

Rob 18:51
Kind of like leaving your doors unlocked in house? Right. It’s your house. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So and that’s, uh, that could be a pain point. So if they’ve already experienced a hack, there’s a big pain there. I’m assuming Absolutely.

Lane 19:04
Yeah, absolutely. There’s, you know, you got to do some cleanup. You got to make sure. You get all the malware out of there. Lock the hackers out, get things up to date, and all that kind of fun stuff.

Rob 19:14
Yeah. So that becomes a big pain point. If somebody says, Yeah, you know what, we don’t keep it up to date like we should. That is an issue, then you have some follow up questions. And one of those questions could be Have you ever noticed that you’ve been hacked? How do you know that you’ve been How do you know that you’ve been hacked? Right. Is that is that a decent question to be asking is how do you know if you’ve been hacked? And when would you know?

Lane 19:36
So it’s, it’s it? The hackers are tricky. Rob. The hackers are very tricky. Sometimes you may know and sometimes you may not know. But there’s there’s a lot of different telltale signs. Interesting.

Rob 19:49
So there’s another question that you could ask that. When you get the answer. you dive in a little further, they may not even know how to tell and like I don’t know that I would know if I was hacking. Write my website, I wouldn’t know if we were hacked. But if I know that certain pieces are in place, then I know that that’s not going to happen. So those are all good questions. So those are good questions, you came up with some really good ones. And really what you did is you said, Hey, here’s some features and benefits that I want to highlight. How do I convert that to a real painful issue? Where if something went wrong, we have the fix. But by asking those questions, now, you’ve learned a lot more about their problem, their issue that you can now ask more follow up questions, to dig deeper into that. And I think the other piece that I really think is important now, too, is in it kind of correlates with your question as to Hey, if pain is important, how important is really features and benefits. And honestly, I would say features and benefits are less important than it is understanding and knowing what their pain or their problems are. Because if you don’t understand what their pains or problems are, you’re really not gonna be able to position yourself as understanding that issue, and that you can actually solve that problem. Right? Right. So you’re right in saying, you know, hey, is is is features and benefits, or is that really important? It’s not as much as you would think. Now that said, when people answer you, when you ask these questions about pain, I kind of correlate this to whenever I have done interviews, and I interview people to hire them. When I’m interviewing people, I find that there’s a correlation with something that happens in sales as well. And here’s what I mean, when I’m in an interview. At some point, I asked a whole bunch of questions anyway, to find out more about them. But then at some point, I’ll ask them, What questions do you have for me, I know you probably brought some questions to learn about us and know a little bit more, what questions do you have? And what’s really weird is the first question is a, like a softball. It’s always the easiest question. So if you were interviewing Layne and I said, Okay, just, you know, I just asked you a bunch of questions. What questions do you have for me? And the first question you can think of is probably the question that somebody might ask, because it’s simple like, well, what kind of person are you looking for? Or, you know, tell me about the schedule. It’s like these stupid little questions. And that’s okay. That’s the way that it’s meant to be those questions that they asked first, coming back is not what they really want to know. There are other questions that they have behind that maybe not even related, maybe not even the same. Your second question is a little deeper, they might ask you about hours and different things. When you’re, when they’re asking you about questions in an interview. Their second question might be, what kind of health benefits do you have here? That’s a better question. There’s more meat to that right. Yes. Third question that they’re going to ask you might be something along the lines of, you know, what’s the pay here? Now we’re getting to what they really need to know. Is it worth their time to work here? Right, the deeper they get into the questioning, the later questions in are really what they want to know. And I find that when I’m doing sales, when I ask a question, and they sound like they have a painful problem, whatever that is, first one that I learn about, it’s just the same as the interviewing thing. It’s it’s a smokescreen. It’s something that says, Yeah, I got this problem. But the real problem is three steps down. So does that depend on their personality type? You know, I’ve never really noticed that it has anything to do with the personality type, it could, it could, because you could have somebody that’s a little more analytical, who wants to find a way to figure out how to get there. But you also can have somebody that’s not very analytical, who’s very high level, they’re probably going to be like a Heidi, they might be more direct in their questioning, but they still usually have a question. That’s kind of a softball. Their first question isn’t always the most important one to them, or they’re their biggest problem, I should say. When I say question from the potential client, it’s really when they talk about a certain pain problem. They’re not really asking me a question, right? They’re, they’re answering my questions and talking about some sort of a pain problem. So most people are guarded, when it comes to pain. They don’t want to let you know where their pains are, where their problems are. So if you’re dealing with a website, you know that it’s probably been, it’s probably crashed, because you can tell that their plugins are outdated, maybe. Or you might ask them some questions, and they answer you a certain way. But then they just take you down this different road, which sounds like That’s not the problem. They take you down a different road, follow the second road, don’t follow the first road. The first problem that they always talk about, is a softball. And it’s done on purpose. Number one, they want to know Do you know what you’re talking about? They’re testing you. Number two, interesting, nobody wants to be vulnerable. Let’s put it that way. Right. So until they feel like they can trust you, they’re not going to give you a lot of information. That’s why it’s really important to start to understand their personality, how to speak to them, how to let them feel comfortable, because if you don’t have that piece, they’re less likely to open up. And that’s really where the key is. All this stuff about features and benefits to me. totally irrelevant. What’s most important is asking the right questions and from the pain side, so that you can understand what their real issues are. That said, when I said that third, or fourth or fifth painting that they talk about is one thing. The other thing you need to understand is, How is this even impacting their lives? So if you’re talking to small business owner, that can impact their lives totally impacted. They could, that could affect their whole livelihood, right? If they’re a big business that could cost them millions of dollars if this problem goes on. So I think if you think about if they say, this problem costs us about $1,000 a day, and they’re a humongous company doing millions of dollars a day $1,000 a day’s work to do nothing. Yeah, right. Yeah. But if you’re a small business, and you’re you’re maybe doing $10,000 a month, $1,000 a day is huge. Yeah. Or it’s, you’re losing your money, right? Or if you’re doing $10,000 a day, I should say, and you’re losing $1,000. That’s huge. Anyway, anyway, that’s a small business, whatever numbers are, they have to make sense? So what you want to do when you ask your questions, and the questions that you just came up with those three, I would start to think about how do I work each of these areas that they answer from a features and benefits standpoint, to how does it impact them, because if it doesn’t impact them at all, there’s no real pain there. Right? If you’re running a company, and you bring in somebody to fix a problem, but in the end, if it gets fixed, it gets fixed. If it doesn’t get fixed, it doesn’t get I don’t care, there’s no pay out, if it impacts you, it affects it affects your bonus, it affects your payroll, or affects your your ability to keep your job, it’s a problem, you need to get it fixed, then it becomes a serious issue for you. Now you got some real pain. If you have to go a little higher than that. And where you don’t have the personal impact. It could be in a numbers impact on the department or in the area of the business. That could be a real issue as well. So figure that out, you have to start to dig into questions that we’ll get to tell me a little bit about how that impacts your department. What does that mean? Does that mean you end up with less sales? Or does that mean you have more expenses? Or you have to fight or something? What does that mean? How does that impact you guys? And it’s asking questions like that, that makes you start to understand now, when you work your way through, and your website costs $10,000? Because it’s really fancy schmancy website that Lane wants to build for you, because he wants to buy another $80,000 car?

Alright, maybe not. But But if but it does, you know, listen, it takes a lot of time to build a website. So when you price it, and then you go, Okay, this is what it’s gonna take. If it’s going to cost 5000, then you got to have at least a reason to make it worth its while. Right? I know that when when we created our website last time, it was like four or $5,000. And we’re like, how is this so expensive? It’s a lot of money to put that together. But when I think back that website, because of certain elements that were in there, that has made us 20 times over that amount of money that we spent on that was worth every penny. Now looking forward, if I had to make another change to a website, I would highly recommend creating something that’s really creative and put the money into it. If that’s what makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense. If there’s no problems, you’re still getting leads, don’t change it right. So those are the pieces that you got to make sure that you start to think about. And when you’re in sales, you tend to not think about the potential customer and what they’re thinking what their issue is. So always think about and get yourself in their shoes by asking the right questions. So I hope that helps you, Elaine, does that answer some of your questions about features and benefits? paid? What other questions Did you have when you were going through this as anything else pop up at?

Lane 28:45
You know, I think what’s kind of spinning through my head now is so now that I’ve learned what their pain points are, how do I turn around and take that into using those pain points to convince them to purchase? And it’s, and maybe I’m thinking about it wrong? Maybe? You know, I don’t know, we’ll have to talk about that probably in another episode. But

Rob 29:04
you are you are thinking about it. Right? That’s okay. Yeah, I don’t mean you’re thinking about wrong in the bad way. What I mean is, and I think we’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Because not everybody thinks the same way is you don’t want to ever put yourself in a position where you have to convince them to buy what you’re doing is when you go through the pain stuff, you’re identifying, is there enough pain? Is there enough of an expense or a desire to get more right? It can go either way? In the for something that’s gonna give him give him more business. Is there enough there to warrant what it’s going to take from the investment side to buy your your product or service? You want to know? Is that realistic? Does that make sense? Now, if you know that it does, they don’t need any convincing. They see it. They already want it. They wouldn’t have called you if they didn’t

Lane 29:52
know true. I guess I I think what, you know, I’m kind of stuck on the features and benefits thing because that’s just how I’ve always thought of it. How do I take Those those those pain points and relay my features and benefits, not just not just being any other site developer, how do I how do I convince them that I’m the right person to do the work rather than somebody else? When they have these pain points?

Rob 30:15
My first reaction to that would be, why do you feel like you have to convince them?

Lane 30:20
Well, I just feel that everyone’s always out shopping around. So, you know, they’re calling me they’re calling three other people. And they’re trying to, maybe they’re trying to find the best deal, the best price? Who knows what they’re trying to find? But you know, how do I use that knowledge of their pain points to close that sale?

Rob 30:37
There’s a whole process to that. And I think we’ll get into that at some point. However, when I hear you talk, there’s a couple of other issues that we have whole other episodes we could talk about, one of which is the mindset of, am I too expensive? Is this more than they can afford? versus I’m worth every penny, and I know they can afford because I know these pain, things are going to cause more expenses, or it’ll drive more revenue for and it’ll offset no problem. And I’m not worried about them spending too much. Because they know, they know, I know, it’s going to be worth the investment. Because what you do is an investment. Yes, it’s an expense on the profit and loss statement. But really, what it should be positioned as an investment, because when you have a really strong website, it generates income for you. And that’s how people should be looking at it. And so should you associate anybody else who’s looking at buying it? Your process is not about converting them from their pains and what their answers are, to converting them to a closing the sale, they’re going to close the sale, here’s what happens. You start asking these pain questions, and you ask enough pain questions. And you start putting finances to those pain questions. Meaning, you find out that if they don’t do this, it’s costing you $1,000 a day, where you find out that if they do this, they’re gonna actually end up with an extra lead or three leads or five leads every day. If they get five leads, how much is the lead when they buy? How much is that for you? Well, every person that buys is $500. Okay, $500. So three leads a day times 505 leads a day, sorry, five leads a day times 500. That’s 20 $500 every day that you could actually add? Hmm. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And is that enough? Like, are you? Is that what you’re looking for? And they’ll they’ll tell you, yeah, that’s what I want. Yeah, that’s what I want. Okay. And what and then they think you have to also back off from that and say, Boy, if you didn’t get 20 $500, or you didn’t get five leads, and you only got three? Is that can be an issue. What if What if that happens? Because that could happen? And then they have to say, No, no, three is better than what we got now. Okay, yeah. Right. So you have to always pull them back to understand it’s not as good as they think it’s going to be because as soon as you pull them back, they’ll start to understand, and they’ll kind of reinforce that, no, this is the right move for me. And we’ll get into some of those types of things we’ve talked about some of that before. The key is, is you’re not going to convince or convert to a sale, they’ll convert themselves, because at some point, they’re going to say to you, what are we going to need to do to get started? That’s what I want to know. I mean, what do we need to check sign? What do we need to do? And that’s when you know, all right, the sales done, and I or if you don’t get that from them, you’ve gone through pain, and you understand some of those things, and you expand the numbers. And the numbers all make sense. And obviously, you’re talking to the right person, they’re gonna make the decision. In the end of that conversation, you could easily just ask, alright, so Well, what do you want to do? What do you think the right next up? Or is it every time I’ve asked, What’s the next step? They go? Yeah, let’s, let’s do this. Let’s get a, let’s get the estimate written out. And, you know, you talked about it costing this much. Let’s, let’s, let’s, you know, I want to see that in writing. And, and then I want to, how quickly can you get started? That’s almost always what happens. They’re, they’re like talking themselves through, here’s what’s gonna be on the estimate, here’s how much When is it going to start? What are we gonna start? And then I have to back them up and go Hold it. So if I write this estimate, and we put those numbers on there, what’s going to happen? Because once I know, they’re already thinking forward, they’re gonna say, Well, I mean, I just sign it right now. Give me a check. Yeah. Okay. That’s, that’s what I thought. All right, I just want to make sure that that’s where we were at, because I didn’t, I didn’t know if that was what we wanted or not. So there’s a whole bunch of things that come from pain that we’re going to get into at some point. But that conversation becomes extremely powerful in terms of a sales process, because it helps you understand what their needs are, but more importantly, helps them make and solidify their decision to say, Yes, I want to work with you, or No, I don’t. Can I tell you the number the sheer number of times that I get through the sales process with people that when they finish that conversation, they say or when they sign up, let’s say they they convert to a sale. They go, nobody else asked me those questions. Nobody. And that’s shocking to me, because I don’t know how you make a decision. From a salesperson standpoint, whether or not it’s a good fit or not by not asking those questions, that’s what’s shocking to me that people are selling things without actually understanding what the client needs or customers need, right? But that’s what they do. And you stand out, you stand out, you make yourself look so much better by asking these questions, and knowing that you understand everything that they do. So does that help? Yeah, that helps a lot. All right, cool. I think what would be cool is, is after the show, I think everybody out there should identify your features and benefits that you want to sell hard, right? You want to do that fine. Now create questions about those features and benefits, so that they’re crafted around pain and do it, where those questions are crafted so that they feel comfortable answering and they can feel comfortable answering honestly, and help them explain what they’re saying. When they say that to you. help them understand why they have the pain without really calling it pain, obviously, you know, anytime whether through this I you know, we refer to it as pain, you know, find the pain, it’s you’re not going to talk about it as as pain, you’re going to talk about it as challenges, issues, things that they’re facing, that you can help solve. So I hope that helps. That’s what I would recommend doing is do those quick steps, identify what they are, write your questions out and be prepared next time you have a sales call to be able to ask those questions and get the answers that you need so that you can make a better informed sale. Until next time.

V/O 36:24
Thank you for listening to this slow pitch. Slow down and close more