“Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he’ll believe you. Tell him the plate your handling him is very hot, and he’ll have to touch it to believe you”
Mike Jaeger, Musician
Eachbusiness issue“pain” comeswithmany problems.
Once you have identified the business issue, the next step is to understand the problems that it causes to the business. These are commonly called pains in sales circles; because without pain, there is not enough motivation for change. Typical examples include:
- Additional or unnecessary steps
- Lack of skill or training in new areas
- Difficulty securing personnel or resources
- Changes in technical or regulatory support requirements
- Mistakes common to manual processes
Every problem and every business issue has a cost or impact(free “gifts of Knowledge”).
There is a cost in doing something; there is also cost in doing nothing. Therefore, our objective as sales people is to help the client to see the value from their perspective, not ours. Also, it is more critical than ever that the value metrics we create with the client are time sensitive and demonstrate payback quickly. The days of annual cost recovery or paybacks or over several years are over for the most-part in today’s technology markets.
Uncoveringthe value metrics is done by asking probing questions, as:
- “How much time are you spending on chasing inventory information?”
- “How much delay did that cause… and how does that translate to revenue production?”
- “You had mentioned quality issues, what is your client return rate?
- “How does this affect you in your business unit”
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate, with a 10 being the most difficult?
- “Are you impacted by this personally?”
There are many ways to get value or what we call “pain metrics’ out of your prospect. The skill needed here is not complicated. All you have to do is to remember that for every solution delivered there has to be “quantifiable not qualitative” delivery of results. And, they are always expressed in dollars, percentages, shorten durations, tec.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.