Recently I read a blog post of a popular sales guru titled “Pain-free selling. What a find! Are you pain free?”
In the blog he wrote:
“But “finding the pain” is not a bit funny in sales. In fact it’s somewhere between sad and manipulative. Somewhere between negative and dark. In short, if you want to find pain, become a doctor – people will come to you with pain by the thousands. If you want to make it in sales, there are other things to find.”
He went on to say;
“Chances are, if you go looking for pain, you’ll lose to someone looking for a positive, meaningful, engaging, value-driven relationship. One that not only leads to an order, it leads to a relationship, testimonials, and referrals. Those are pleasures. Find those, and you’ll get rid of the pain in your wallet.”
This sales guru is also known for saying “Looking for Pain” in sales is so “Seventies”.
The sales guru is not completely wrong. He is correct that people want to buy, not be sold. He is correct that sales should be a career full of fun and excitement, and it is. He is also correct when he says the focus should be on value and not price.
But he is sorely incorrect when he says that sales is not about finding pain.
I am not advocating being manipulative or using some sad technique to fear your clients. I am not advocating operating from a negative or dark space. I do not take pleasure, nor is it my life’s work to find pain, but if I truly understand what motivates people, I will quit talking about the ROI and start listening to the compelling reasons and the consequences of not taking action.
As far as I am concerned, the best doctors are salespeople as well. And the best salespeople follow the same protocol as the best doctors. In fact, if all salespeople operated like great doctors, there would never have been the stigma of deception the sales profession carries today. Great doctors ask questions first to better understand the symptoms, then implement different tools that correctly diagnose the problem, finally they write the prescription and/or issues orders.
In contrast, most salespeople walk, full of hope, into the prospects office with the prescription first, as if it were some magic drug that cured all of the prospects ills. If they can just get the prospect to understand all the benefits of this magic drug, the prospect will surely buy.
What those hopeful salespeople don’t understand is that writing a prescription without a diagnosis is malpractice.
Salespeople and sales managers should not be cheerleaders, and those who think they are, never seem to manage their sales forces or their opportunities correctly. These same hopeful salespeople are the ones who have pipeline bloat, the condition that occurs when you don’t remove “never” or “maybe”prospects from the pipeline because you are hopeful that one day they will see the light and finally buy from you. Of course pipeline bloat is the cause of inaccurate sales projections, underachieving salespeople, loss of market share, missed opportunities, and frustrated CEOs.
I have helped thousands of people at some level or another change their perspective, not by appealing to what they can gain, but rather focusing on the consequence of not changing. I call this “Looking for Pain.” It’s not that people don’t want gain, it’s just they are more willing and will do more to move away from pain than move towards gain.
Maybe the sales guru’s understanding of pain is different from mine. He talks like an exploration of pain is a sadistic need on the salesperson’s part. As if the more I twist your arm the more likely you are to buy.
I don’t need to use pain. I don’t need to generate pain. The prospect already has pain and will tell me about it if I know how to listen for it. The prospect’s pain is the very reason we are talking. Sales is one of the most mistrusted professions in the world, why would anyone subject themselves to a salesperson unless they were in some sort of pain? Why would they meet with sales people unless they couldn’t handle the problem on their own?
I am no exception to the rule.
I avoid pain more than I move toward gain.
This reminds me of an instance in the past when I had a broken molar.
I don’t like the dentist, not only the pain involved, but having someone in my personal space working on my mouth is not very comfortable. Unfamiliar sensations, so close to the center of my perceived identity does not help either.
One day as I was eating, I broke a molar. I felt and removed pieces of it in my mouth, but there was no pain indicating a problem, so I did nothing.
A couple months later, swelling started above that tooth and it throbbed in pain. I was in pain and could only think about the pain that pulsated from my mouth. I called the dentist to make an appointment and they indicated it would be another 6 weeks before they could fit me in. They called a prescription in for me for some antibiotics and after a few days of taking the pills, my tooth felt better. Five weeks later, I cancelled my appointment, having more important business to tend to, or so I told the receptionist, actually, it was the dread of the dentist’s office that kept me from the appointment.
This cycle of events happened about 5 times.
Now I knew then that it was a bad idea to have a broken tooth in my head. All kinds of health issues can arise from a broken tooth. Short term issues are infection, headaches, tiredness, bad breath, and digestion issues. Long term issues include heart and liver damage as well as some people believe that cancer can be derived from having a broken tooth. I knew all of this. These were facts established by the scientific community, but yet I did not respond to the facts. I responded much stronger to the dread of the dentist’s office than I did to the logic of fixing the tooth.
Then one day cupid struck.
I met a girl quite by accident, and kept bumping into her around town. Fate was at play and I could feel it, and the very afternoon I decided I was going to ask her out on a date, knowing my breath stunk because of the tooth, I went straight to the oral surgeon's office and had the tooth removed that afternoon.
Why did I get it removed?
If you said so I could get the girl you would be wrong.
I had the tooth removed because I knew my breath stunk, and the fear of being rejected because of my bad breath was greater than the fear of the pain that removing the tooth would cause. In other words, because of the perceived and imagined pain of rejection, all the pain associated with the fear of the dentists office paled in comparison.
Two lessons this story illustrates;
The first is that I had to perceive a pain greater than the one I was fearful of to move me past my fears.
The second is, that emotional pain will always trump and be feared more than physical pain.
I know it makes a lot of salespeople feel better to read the sales guru’s post, but I am not in sales to make friends, nor am I in sales to influence people. I am in sales to assist people obtain what they need and get paid well doing it.
Diagnosing sales forces is difficult and there is a lot that can be misrepresented if not understood correctly. Sales management fails most times due to lack of accountability, lack of effective training, and using the wrong personnel. Need for approval, excuse making, money issues, and lack of desire are the biggest reasons salespeople fail, do you know how to tell if your sales force is suffering from any of the above?
