Pain & Hope; The Essence of Great Selling
- Dan Greenberg
- Oct 23, 2024
- 6 min read
Wouldn’t it be great if it were simple? Just read this article and you are all set. You will understand the essence, and you will be a great seller. But, as we all know, there is nothing about learning to sell that is tied up in a neat little bow of catharsis. The secret is that there is no secret.
I read a lot from Chris Orlob, former sales leader at Gong, and successful sales trainer. He, and many other great sellers and experts will talk to you about finding the buyer’s pain, and consistently returning to that pain so that your solution has context and meaning for them.
Here is Orlob talking about finding and framing around the buyer’s pain, “Here’s a mistake almost all salespeople make on sales demos: Forgetting to frame and reframe the pain each feature solves. Not just at the beginning of the call…”
I also read a lot by Jeffrey Gitomer, prolific author and self proclaimed King of Sales, also mentioned above. He and a number of other excellent sellers and experts will talk about relationship building and keeping interactions positive. They focus on keeping the buyer in the right mindset and staying away from conversations about pain.
Here is Gitomer on staying away from “pain” conversations, “If you’ve taken any training in sales in the last 50 years, you’ve probably heard this phrase: “Find your customer’s pain.” What keeps them up at night? What’s going wrong with their business? What do they hate about their competitors? Personally, I cannot stand this approach to sales. It’s a tactic from the old world of business. And it’s about as subtle and obvious as a freight train…”
You could be forgiven for getting a bit of whiplash reading these one after the other. Orlob essentially says that if you don’t consistently reference the buyer’s pain, there will be no context for your solution and the buyer won’t make the connection so you won’t make a deal, and he has been incredibly successful with his approach. Gitomer, on the other hand, is saying that if you bring up pain, you will put the buyer in the wrong mindset and you will sour the interaction causing the buyer to become closed off and you won’t get a deal. He has also been very successful with his approach.
So, which is it? Who is right? I am a big fan of both Orlob and Gitomer, so would you be surprised to hear me tell you that both are right? It’s true, I mean, that’s not an ideal answer for you because it means that there is no easy answer. It means that it’s going to take work and effort for you to improve and incorporate these philosophies into your selling.
Of course, what I am saying here is that it is situational. Gitomer is right in many situations where the relationship is newer and the client may not be fully bought into your level of expertise or the relationship with you. As Gitomer goes on to explain, if you haven’t built proper rapport with a client, bringing up pain points will make the client uncomfortable and will cause them to associate you with that negative feeling making it harder for you to develop a good relationship. The client will become defensive and less willing to engage in real conversation. Orlob, on the other hand, is right in situations where the value proposition is at the core of the conversation, but only in situations where you, as a seller, have already sold yourself, and your value as a consultative partner. If the client does respect and trust you, the seller, independent from what you are selling, then talking about features and products without connecting to the pain will be a disconnect for the client. As Orlob goes on to explain, when you talk about features without framing it in the context of the problem it sounds like a feature dump. You will have a client who trusts you to be concerned about their business, and they will see you as talking about the things you care about instead of the things they care about.
So where does this leave us? If we have two experts who are both right, who do you listen to? That is part of what this blog is here to work through. The fact that sales deals with living, breathing, deciding creatures is what makes it so hard. There are often answers that are right in some cases and will kill a deal in other cases. The only thing that allows you to know the right course of action is your attention and perceptiveness. You have to be attuned enough to know which situation you are in.
Let’s look at this from a slightly different angle to help make it make sense. Marketers can always talk about the pain because the reader of a marketing piece is not vulnerable in front of another person. Marketers are talking through a screen and not face to face. This means that the reader of the material won’t experience nearly as much discomfort because they are not in a social interaction where they feel a need to justify their past decisions and position themselves as strong and capable. As sellers, we don’t have the screen to divide us from the client. Sellers have to be able to pick up on subtle cues that tell us if the buyer is feeling vulnerable, or uncomfortable, or if they are feeling trusting, and like they want to learn.
This is hard to do because humans have been learning to lie with their faces for their entire lives. In Joe Navarro’s excellent book, “What EveryBODY Is Saying” he discusses, at length, the amount of practice we, as human beings, have had lying through use of our facial expressions. We have been taught to betray our actual feelings using socially acceptable facial signals since we were young. Therefore, it is very hard to pick up social cues from people’s faces, because we have been training ourselves to present the message we want to present for our whole lives and not present what we are really feeling. There are many other cues that we can start to learn to pick up on, but they are more subtle, and it is harder to do. Where sellers have a hard task is that we have to deal with the person, and all the politics, and vulnerability and personality that entails. We have to know when we have permission to pry, and to get to the point, and to really be direct about the pain and the solution and when we don’t have that permission.
Pain is a necessary part of any sales conversation because it connects the thing that a seller is trying to sell back to the thing that the buyer wants to overcome. Sure, that could be a pain point, or an opportunity, but either way, the buyer is missing out on something they want. The seller’s job is to emotionally connect the buyer to that desired state, whether it be the resolution of a pain or the pain or not being able to reach a potential opportunity. Closing a deal is, in large part, a function of making that emotional connection happen, which starts with connecting the solution to the pain, and helping the client visualize the desired outcome.
On the other hand, if the conversation revolves around pain the client’s emotional signals will be negative, and their subconscious mind will help their conscious mind find a reason to avoid you so that they can avoid the negative emotion. The hopefulness of the buyer’s desired outcome has to override the pain of the problem in order for them to want to work with you to get there.
Sure, as mentioned above, the timing matters. While building a relationship, positivity is important, and while closing a deal, connecting the solution to the pain is important. However, this article is much more about reading your client than anything else. Clients who are not emotionally engaged need to be reminded of pain, and clients who are focused on the negative need to be reminded of the hope that comes along with their desired and achievable solutions. Where your client lies on that spectrum; figuring that out is your most important job as a seller.
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