Think about the way you buy. I’ll bet it’s usually an emotional response that has you pay good money for what you bought. It may as simple as the emotion of salivating for a yummy treat or it may be the internal need to buy a safe product to protect your family.
We decide and justify the buying decision intellectually after the emotional decision has been made. The emotional decision is always made at an unconscious level. We call this PAIN. Once you understand this, then you begin to understand why prospects buy or don’t buy from you. Even after you have proven and shown all the features and benefits. The problem with feature and benefit selling is its intellectual and doesn’t address the PAIN. Features and benefits are about your product.
When uncovering pain, you move the prospect from the general to the specific - from the surface problem to the underlying reason and only then to the personal impacts or PAIN. That's why the Pain Funnel is just that -- a funnel.
It takes the prospect from the "top," a statement of the surface problem, through the examination of what the problem is costing, what has been tried in the past, how the problem is affecting the prospect, and whether the prospect has given up trying to deal with the problem or is even willing to fix it.
By following this questioning technique for each surface problem identified by the prospect, what comes out the "bottom" of the funnel is a prospect that is well on the way to being qualified or disqualified based on PAIN.
If you have an intellectual conversation about a prospect’s problem, you’ll get an intellectual response. That sounds like: “I’ll think it over”, or “What does that cost?” It means you haven’t found a prospect with real pain.
Here is the rule….No Pain, No Sale.
You might also be interested in: