The other day I was in our salesman.org community trying to help a sales professional who sells a consulting product.

His issue was that when prospecting, his potential buyers would always say that the service he offers is a “nice to have” rather than a “necessity”.

So I started to engage with this individual in the community and it turns out he wasn’t doing a very good job of uncovering the real pain points that his buyers had.

He could get the point of uncovering the surface level pain (something is wrong), but he wasn’t asking the right questions to get to the bottom of what was really causing the issue (must solve problem).

I showed him the 5 pain point questions that I’m going to share with you in this video and is response in the community was epic. He said that these 5 pain finding questions had transformed his sales conversations.

So lets get into them.

When you engage with your buyers you’ll hear lots of potential pain points. When a buyer gives you their pain, it’s usually a “surface level pain” and not the real issue they need to solve.

SURFACE LEVEL PAINS

When asked about their business pain points, buyers will only give you surface level pain points because they don’t have the expertise to really get to the bottom of the issues.

That’s good news for us sales people because if buyers had the knowledge, products or expertise to dive deeper into their pains they could solve them without your help.

So this leaves a gap between a buyer knowing they have a problem and not knowing how to fix it and that’s where we come in.

Before we get into pain questions there are four main categories that surface-level buyer pains fall into. Once you understand each of the categories, you’ll be able to quickly diagnose your buyer pain points on discovery calls with buyers.

Here are the four categories of surface level buyer pain and a few examples of how your buyers might describe them:

A: Financial pain

* “Revenue is up, but profits are down”* “I don’t have enough visibility of the numbers to make sound financial decisions”* “We’re only profitable enough to keep the doors open”

B: People pain

* “Our team’s morale is low”* “Our managers don’t drive innovation”* “Our best employees keep leaving to our competitors”

C: Productivity pain

* “We keep missing our client deadlines”* “We have quality issues that are leading to higher refunds”* “We spend too much time in meetings”

D: Process pain

* “Our hiring process is a mess“* “We have no system in place to monitor our sales pipeline”* “The customer service department is inundated and can’t keep up”

Do me a favour and leave a comment below sharing which category of pain your product solves. I’m interested to know what pain points you are experiencing and I can then focus some new content in that direction.

So now you know the categories of your buyers surface level pain points and you’ve heard some examples of how your buyers might share these pain points with you, lets look at some questions we can ask to dig deeper into the buyers pain.

We want to dig deeper into the buyers pain so that we can align the service we sell that solves the pain to the deepest pain we can.

When we align our service to a really deep pain, our service becomes a “must have” rather than “something to consider next quarter”.