Don't make your selling small

Stop focusing on “pain points.”

They make your selling small.

Every day on LinkedIn you are exhorted to understand your buyer’s “pain points.” And connect your solution to their “pain.”

But what if the pain is mostly in your mind and not theirs?

I’ve won over half a billion dollars in orders over the course of my career. Winning mega-deals and small deals with customers all around the world.

Not once, in English or any other language, have I ever asked a prospect about their “pain points.”

Why? Because they didn’t have pain points.

What these decision-makers had instead were ambitions and goals and a vision of the things they wanted to achieve for their business.

They didn’t see pain. They saw opportunity.

They wanted to increase market share. They wanted to grow revenue. They wanted to reduce their product costs. They wanted to shorten product development cycles. And more.

And they were looking for a vendor to help them shape that vision and achieve those outcomes.

Vision. Ambition. Opportunity. Change. Transformation.

That’s what you need to connect your solution to. Not pain points.

How you visualize how you’re helping your buyers translates into the actions you take.

My printer has run out of ink. That’s a pain point.

I don’t need a salesperson to fix that.

On a personal level, I sometimes cut my finger chopping vegetables for dinner. That’s a pain point.

I clean the wound, stick a band-aid on it and I’m good to go.

Small problem. Easily fixed.

That’s what pain points represent to buyers.

Something relatively small that you put a band-aid on.

Truly understanding the most important things the buyer wants to achieve is the objective of discovery.

Focus on uncovering the buyer’s pain points and you make your selling small.

And you become smaller, less relevant and less valuable to the buyer as a result.

A customer can buy band-aids from anyone.

Making a change to achieve their key ambitions is what they should be buying from you.