I wanted to discuss another aspect of the pain funnel with you.
I've talked about the pain funnel in some previous blogs, but I’d like to single out one part of the pain funnel that is quite often the most overlooked, because it's a difficult place to take things.
The pain funnel is designed to take a broad issue, and get down to the actionable, committed, personal, quantifiable issue that a prospect would have. The pain funnel is really meant to walk the prospect through these series of questions, to get from the broad issue down to the specific, and ultimately, see how committed they are.
[You can download the pain funnel questions here]
The one that I want to concentrate on is “how do you feel about that?”
Let's take a step back, though.
Emotion creates action. We know that people buy emotionally, and they justify things intellectually. The problem is, a lot of salespeople don't go that deep into a conversation, and they sell at the intellectual level. They do kind of a ‘fact finder’, asking SOME questions, but they don't get to the level of how it affects that person individually.
Keep in mind, pain is personal, and emotional.
The emotional part is the feelings they have attached to the problem. The personal aspect has to do with that person specifically.
If you're selling into a company, they might have a global pain, or a department wide pain, but I have to get down (every single time!) to the person I'm talking to. How does that affect you, personally?
So the, “how do you feel about that" is the question in the pain funnel. Let me give you an alternative way to ask it.
I'll just kind of role play it.
If I’m taking a prospect through this whole thing, we quantify their pain, I understood their pain, what the issue was, then I would say:
"I appreciate you sharing these issues with me, but I gotta think this is more of a business problem. It really doesn't affect you personally, does it?"
That's technically called a negative reverse sell, which you might know.
I'm basically saying that it's a business problem and that it probably doesn't affect them personally. At which point, if it does, they will start proving to me and selling me on how it affects them personally.
It's a very powerful, slight edge way to do it.
So whether you do it the way I've described with that negative reverse, or if you just use the question “how do you feel about that?”, the key is to get the pain to the personal and emotional level. You'll create much more motivated prospects.
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