5 Questions To Uncover The Buyers REAL PAIN | Selling Made Simple

Killing it in sales is all about one thing—alignment. Is what you’re selling the solution to your prospect’s problem? Does it alleviate their pain points?

The tricky thing though is that 95% of the time, prospects only tell you about their surface-level pains. But to close a deal successfully, you need to be able to solve the problem that’s causing those pains.

You’ve got to treat the disease, not the symptoms. And today we’re looking at 5 word-for-word questions to help.

Surface Level Pains

During the first few talks with potential buyers, you’ll only scratch the surface of their pain points. Your prospects don’t have the expertise to really get to the bottom of the issues. And so you’re left with the superficial problems, not the ones that are the real cause of their pains.

Now that’s actually good news for salespeople like us. Because if buyers did have that knowledge, products, or expertise needed 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. We close that gap. But to do that, we need to move past the superficial pain points and get to the heart of a buyer’s problem. And we can do that using five questions in particular.

Now before we get into those questions, there are four main categories that surface-level buyer pains fall into. Let’s look at some examples of what your potential buyers might say for each category.

#1. Financial Pains

Financial pains. You can spot these with statements like…

* “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”

#2. People Pains

People pains, shown by statements like…

* “Our team’s morale is low”

* “Our managers don’t drive innovation”

* “Our best employees keep leaving to our competitors”

#3. Productivity Pains

Productivity pains…

* “We keep missing our client deadlines”

* “We have quality issues that are leading to higher refunds”

* “We spend too much time in meetings”

#4. Process Pains

And process pains, which show up with statements like…

* “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”

Alright, so now you know the four categories of pain points. And you’ve heard some examples of how they might share them. So let’s now look at some questions we can ask to dig deeper into the buyer's pain.

We want to dig deeper into the buyer’s pain so that we can align our service to their deepest, most impactful pain points. Because when we align our service to a really deep pain, it becomes a “must have” rather than “something to consider next quarter”.

1. “What’s holding you back?”

The first question that we can ask to dig deeper into the pain of our buyers is this:

“What’s the main thing holding your company (or division) back from growing right now?”

This question is great at eliciting a very specific response. One that lands your prospects pains into one of the four categories we covered before.

* Financial Pain

* People Pain

* Productivity Pain

* Processing Pain

This question is the starting point to go a level deeper than the more general categories of pain that we’ve already discussed.

And once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next question…

2. “How do you plan to solve this?”

“How do you plan to solve this pain point?”

An uneducated buyer will tell you that they are unsure how to solve their pain point. This is an incredible opportunity for you to educate the buyer on how you...