Pain: Understanding all the dimensions and complexities

Jan 24

8 min read

Last week I laid out the 3 critical elements present in any deal, Pain, Power, and Vision. This week, I will dive into Pain in more detail. We talked about how the pain of doing nothing must be greater than the pain of changing. But pain is not just how hard it is for the users or departments to do their jobs, which is operational pain. It is also much more complicated than just the business pain (although that is critical). So let's dive into all the dimensions of pain in a typical company.

Operational versus Business Pain:

We touched on this last week, but it is so important that I want to dig in a little deeper. In discovery, we will likely uncover a lot of operational pain in companies. Users and managers feel this every day. But we can't stop there. Our job as sellers is to help the prospects see that there are business problems as a result of the operational pain (the So What), and those problems can then have a quantified impact (ROI). Top down sales cycles start with the business problem and then moves down to discover the root cause (operational pain). But most sales cycles start with a department that has some difficulty doing their jobs, and then our work is to elevate that pain and impact to the C-Suite.

To illustrate this point, I was working with a company that monitored fuel tanks for C-Stores. Without this sophisticated, central visibility, when alarms went off, the field tech team did not know what was wrong. They typically received a call from the store clerk, simply saying alarms were going off. The operational pain here would be lack of data and visibility into the fuel tanks. There are many different impacts, or business problems, that result from this pain, but one impact was that some of those trips then required a second trip, since the tech did not know what the problem was in advance. We then have to dig and find out the percentage of service calls that have 2 trips, let's say in this case it is 10% of the time, and then quantify the problem. 10,000 calls at 10% that incur 2 trips, times $500 per trip would equal $500,000 in service call savings, since the better visibility would eliminate the second trip. And that is just one business problem that arises from poor visibility into the fuel tanks.

The classic feature/benefit approach skips a very important step, which is the operational pain and the resulting business problem and impact. We want to go from operational pain to business pain to quantified impact.

Pain must be ACTIVE:

There are always operational problems in most departments and processes today. After all, the world runs on spreadsheets. Latent pain is pain that is not felt, or the prospect has given up hope that it can be solved. Also, some stakeholders can be in active pain, while their managers and executives do not feel it. It is certainly frustrating when someone has latent pain around something you know is a problem. In this case, we should not disqualify too early. We have to move buyers from latent pain to active pain to have any chance of a deal.

There are many ways to do this. Customer stories help tremendously, since they offer proof that others have the problem and that it can be solved. For people who just accept the current process, we have to dig, find the issues that exist, and then bring them to light. This is why a good, consultative discovery process is so important in enterprise sales. The more pain points we can identify, the more credible we are and the more the prospect will trust us.

Not only does pain have tp be active, but it also has to be present. Future pain is not enough. It is very hard to create urgency for a problem that might occur in the future. Consider when a company needs to replace an old system. We cannot stop at the "we really need to replace this old system" pain. We need to dig further and uncover pain points of using the current system, and figuring out the "why change now" message, instead of just trust the prospect to actually replace the system.

In summary, we have to remember that we need active and present day pain to create urgency and close deals. So if your prospect is just not feeling the pain, you need to get creative, bring the pain to light, or de-prioritize this deal in your pipeline.

People do not buy based just on the business problem, they buy based on the POLITICS of the business problem.

This is when my reps get really frustrated with me. I spend a great deal of time figuring out if there is a problem worth solving. But even if there is a business problem, that is not even half the battle. We cannot forget that companies do not buy, people do. This means that the business or company problems must translate to a high degree of political and personal pain for individual stakeholders. It also helps to find a link between these problems and strategic issues or initiatives for the company. Our job becomes taking operational pain points, understanding the business problems that arise, and then linking those problems to their Strategic, Personal, and Political pains. See the chart below.

Here are some thoughts on these important categories of pain:

Political: Human nature is to take care of yourself and your family first and then worry about others. While there are good Samaritans out there, I certainly have not sold to any. So if someone is really going to champion the cause, there has to be something in it for them. A promotion, keeping one's job, being seen as innovative, and even keeping or earning the reputation of a great leader and change agent are all common political reasons to support a project. It could be a wide variety of reasons, so the more curious we are, the more credibility we have, increases our chances of getting to the real reason for the project.

We were starting a sales cycle with a large retailer. They hired a new CFO from outside of retail to significantly change the culture by adding needed discipline and process. He needed to prove himself in a new industry, and his goal was to become President. While our solution was very tactical, basically helping them optimize the markdowns of their seasonal merchandise, we positioned the solution as an example of using data and math to make better decisions, which aligned with his strategy of more discipline and process. He then championed the project and knocked down a lot of walls to fast track the project. This is a great example of linking a tactical business problem to a higher level issue that aligned with an executive's political pain.

Personal: Obviously the most difficult pain point to figure out, personal pain is the overriding influence on enterprise deals. A lot of times it is very closely linked with political pain, tied to a promotion, etc... But it all depends on the person's style and behavior. Are they risk averse? If they are, then they will probably lean toward a well known vendor. I have always heard no one gets fired for choosing IBM. Some vendors are resume builders, like SAP, Oracle, etc.... It takes a motivated and fearless sponsor to overcome the SAP momentum. Salesforce.com has become a bit like that.

This is clearly the most sensitive pain point for the stakeholder, so we need to tread lightly. The best reps will establish rapport and credibility, and with their genuine curiosity, will be able to understand at least some of the factors that drive people and what they really care about. But the bottom line is that without some sort of personal and political pain, it will be hard to get the motivation for change required to land these large deals.

Strategic: We can learn a lot about a company these days by simple googling "strategic initiatives of prospect". Most companies publish high level goals, strategies, and initiatives which then flow down to various departments. Learning how these high level initiatives guide and impact your buyers will help you develop this strategic linkage. Developing this strategic linkage is a major indicator of success in sales. Top C-level executives are much more inclined to pay attention and approve projects when your sponsor understands and positions how this project is in line with overall company goals and strategies.

I was working with a company that offered leave management solutions, which enabled companies to streamline their FMLA eligibility calculations and workflow. Many companies have some sort of employee satisfaction strategy and they measure it against retention, surveys, etc... Getting the FMLA request wrong, or making it difficult for the employee to navigate it, results in highly dissatisfied employees and sometimes even lawsuits. Not taking care of your employees during this time of stress can truly hurt retention and overall satisfaction. When we can establish that linkage all the way from leave management features to the problems of employee dissatisfaction, we can present a much more strategic and compelling story to the executives.

I will admit that this is not always easy to get this strategic linkage, but it increasing your probability of a deal tremendously when we can get it. It is easier to link to something more strategic when we stay away from product features and talk about a broader vision and reason for developing our solution in the first place.

Financial: I have this last in the list, since without the other pain points, this will not matter and not lead to a sale. The pain points here are easy to list. It is expense/cost reduction, revenue growth, margin improvement, and inventory reduction at the highest level. There are many financial and accounting details we can get into here, but for this post, I want to highlight 3 issues I have seen with ROI models.

The prospect has to be involved with the ROI calculation. High level ROI estimates that are not based on the prospects specific situation are rarely accepted. Talking about high level value estimates from other customers is OK at the beginning of the cycle, but once the cycle begins, everything has to revolve around the prospects issues and situation.
Prospects are VERY reluctant to go forward with sales growth estimates. This is too risky for most directors, VPs and even EVPs. And there is so many factors that can get in the way of actual sales growth, much less the difficulty in measuring how much impact came from your solution, that most prospects will highly discount these sales growth numbers. We need to find a way to link our solution to cost reduction, which typically means a lot of time will need to be spent finding gaps and mistakes with their current process.
FTE reduction will rarely justify a large project. I have heard many times from my reps how our solution will make them more productive and efficient, but without linking productivity to something other than FTE reduction, deals have a lower probability of closing or being approved.

The good news here is that most people buy based on emotions, personal and political pains, so if there is a good business problem that people care about personally, they can typically find ways to justify the project.

Summary: I can't possibly spend this much time on each account to understand all this information.

I would agree. No one can cover all the bases and run a perfect sales cycle. There is no such thing. The point here, however, is that operational pain is nowhere near enough to drive a deal to closure. A good business problem(s) is also not enough. You need to find the personal and political pains that are solved with your solution. This does not have to be across all stakeholders, since many time there are 10-15 people involved, but it does have to be wide and high enough to cover the most influential people in the deal. The reps that can uncover and highlight all the dimensions of pain in their accounts will increase the probability of winning and separate themselves from the crowd.

Stay tuned for a deep dive into Power in the next Selling with Attitude post.