New Sales Book Tells Us to Find Pain

I was in an airport yesterday wandering to my gate and just about bumped right into a book kiosk. The kiosk, dripping sales books, jutted into the walk way. I picked up this sales book. It had a catchy title, something like the complex sales is different. I went to the index and read and then read several blurbs in some of the chapters.

I read something interesting. The author told me to find pain. Find a prospect that has pain. I thought of sales presentations preaching to the audience about the vendor and now to the pain that the solution solves.

Put a $ Number on Pain

Finding pain and mapping the capabilities of your solution to this pain is a good thing to do. Even better is to find out what that pain is causing the prospect in dollars. The pain is causing lost sales, inaccurate orders, lost quotes, excess administration, and others. Then do your best to put a number on this.

“Without a quote tracking system you believe you are losing orders?” yes

“How many orders are you missing out on?

“What is this costing in lost sales revenues? “

The sales person can go, and should go deeper. Get the total number of quotes, the win rate, the average win dollar amount. This would put a good number on the quote issue and help the prospect balance a payback to solution cost.