Imagine enquiring about membership at a local gym, and a staff member asks, “What health problems do you suffer from, morbid obesity or something else?”
How would you feel about that gym, assuming, like most people, you are fit but could stand to lose some weight and build muscle?
Presumption of damage is always a terrible way to start a relationship with a prospective customer, whether your business is fitness, financial services, food processing, or something else. Yet I regularly encounter salespeople who presume damage, having been trained to seek out problems and pain points—often by sales “trainers” who have never been successful at sales and are content to work in low-paying training jobs.
Customers with “problems” are exceedingly rare, as their companies tend to go out of business. Far more common are customers who are highly intelligent, successful, and adept, who also want to improve some aspect of their businesses—often with urgency.
The desire to improve is neither a problem nor a pain point. It is the natural state of a healthy business and competent managers. You show me a company whose managers all say they have nothing to improve, and I’ll show you a moribund business barreling toward crisis.
In a role-play with a salesperson, I played a prospective customer. The salesperson played himself. He started by smugly telling me, “Logistics costs have been high recently, and cargo space availability is a problem. We can help you save money and procure space for you.”
I paused before responding in character, “You know, our company is the top manufacturer in the world for our category. Logistics costs and cargo space availability is rarely a significant issue for us.”
The salesperson froze. He had no idea what to say next. Remaining in character, I mercifully ended the meeting and thanked him for stopping by.
In the real world, this salesperson’s close rates were less than five percent, and many of his colleagues weren’t doing much better. The deals they did manage to close were often barely profitable. Some were even in the red!
The sales director overseeing the salespeople asked me to help him prepare for an upcoming meeting with a prospective customer at a global Japanese manufacturing company at the top of its game. During the meeting with his prospect, the sales director performed as we had practiced.
“So tell me,” he said to the prospect. “What prompted you to agree to meet with me?”
The prospect explained how his top priority was to reduce in-transit inventory, which was not only eating up precious cash that the company wanted to invest in growth elsewhere but also creating supply chain inefficiencies. He wanted to improve efficiency urgently so the company’s sales force could satisfy the service requirements of more exacting customers and expand the company’s market share.
The sales director got the business. His salespeople must learn to perform in the same way, and he will hold them accountable for doing so.
After all, there is no percentage in problems and pain points. Improvement is always where the greatest business opportunities reside.
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