If you are starting of your career in sales, you’ll hear this term a lot – customer pain-points. You’ll be told to just solve them and you’ll be through, but it this advice good enough to take you through the rest of your career? Let’s explore.
It is true that when you are trying to get yourself to your first few meetings, you are essentially trying to test the waters and the easiest way to make yourself comfortable is to listen to the customer, ask the questions which will help you gather information on what the prospect is missing, and hustle to solve that problem. This technique works a lot of times and hence gets quoted quite often to sales folks. It is typically a low hanging fruit, which means that follow this process enough times, and you’ll not only get better at it but will also get you plenty of sales. But as you progress through your career, you’ll realize that this strategy is great when ‘times are good’ and you have prospects who have problems and you are the right partner they believe should be hired. But what happens when the prospect you are trying to do business with doesn’t have a pain-point. Yeah, it’s quite possible that prospects are just oblivious to the fact that they have an issue at hand.
To illustrate this point, let’s do a role play. In fact when you are faced with a doubt, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and imagine what would you have done in the same situation.
1. Imagine it’s the beginning of the 21st century and you are a successful fixed-phone manufacturer. You are approached by a sales person who says that he can help you solve any pain-points that you might have. You might very well scoff at the idea, you don’t have any pain-points. In fact your business is booming. Fast forward ten years and your company will be out of business as the cell-phone market has completely taken over, in fact the Apple and Android phones are just about to flood the market sending all the fixed-phone companies into oblivion.
2. A more direct example: A flat-screen TV was not an outcome of a pain-point. Everyone was pretty happy and proud of how their TVs were. They did the job pretty well, the picture was good and so was the sound, and no one really cared on how much space they took. At least they didn’t fathom that a better solution was available, hence no pain-point.
3. Recently a Fortune 50 company decided to jump on to the born digital company route. They have systems which worked fairly well and there was no pain-point as such, but still a massive exercise of 3 years was undertaken to revamp all of their systems.
History provides a glimpse on a lot of such examples that weren’t customer pain-points but transformed the industry. They were all possible because someone had a dream. A dream of a better future, to ease things. Behind all of these transformations have been sales people who had to sell that dream to the end customer to bring these products and solutions to life.
Let’s head back to the 3 examples listed above to see how effectively selling a dream can transform your sales career.
1. Instead of the sales person reaching out to the fixed-phone company trying to solve a pain-point, had gone on to show the vision of the future where cell-phones dominate the market and the concept of phone operating systems are prevalent, would have not only transformed the company’s growth trajectory but could have scaled the company to the likes of the current phone manufacturer giants such as Apple and Samsung.
2. While there was no perceivable pain-point to be overcome in case of CRT (Cathode ray tube) TVs being transformed to flat screen televisions. The idea of a screen that is more vibrant, slimmer, and much larger brought in the flat screen revolution. If it be left to solving pain-points, we would still have the bulky TV sets sitting in our drawing rooms.
3. The Fortune 50 company revamping their systems will see tremendous opportunity after they are at a steady state with their new system. They are already witnessing incremental growth in their user base, well into beating their competition. The reason: a salesperson drove the vision to their CTO (Chief Technology Officer) on where the industry is headed, and what they can achieve by transforming their internal and external systems. Today the company is looking at global markets to be the next powerhouse.
This brings us to the power of selling dreams. And this is not just a fictional or as some people imagine, a ‘slimy’ concept. It is in fact, the difference between a good and a great sales person. There is no harm in selling purely on the basis of customer pain-points. Those will continue to remain but will remain at a much lower scale. Whereas a sales person who can communicate the dream and envision it along with the customer, is at an entirely different level, playing in the league of great sales professionals, while at the same time scripting history.
