man in painFor seven months, I suffered with some extraordinarily severe knee pain. Thankfully, the doctors fixed me up on New Year’s Eve and now my knee is back to normal. I’d like to share a few things I learned during my experience with pain, and then try to relate it to sales in the b2b sphere. I think there are a few connections.

It’s hard to think rationally when you’re in pain. When something unwelcome is in your head all the time – like pain, for instance – it starts to affect your thinking. I noticed I wasn’t thinking straight at times, mainly because the pain was almost continuously distracting me.

It’s hard to stay on an even keel. The ever present distraction affected my mood, too. It tended to exaggerate my grumpiness, and on those rare occasions when I was relatively pain free, I became euphoric.

Pain made me cautious. Now, I’m not a big daredevil to begin with. My idea of adventure is using a pen on the Saturday New York Times crossword. Be that as it may, when you’re in pain, the last thing you want is more pain. So I became more protective of my knee, less inclined to do simple things like walk down to the mailbox when the driveway was icy. I passed up several rounds of golf in the fall because I didn’t want to risk an injury. (As an aside, the one time I did play, I shot a 79, my best round in about ten years. That also led to euphoria.)

Pain becomes the new normal. After a few months I had adapted to my condition – avoiding stairs, avoiding long car trips, etc. I accepted the fact that I might have to live this way for a while, perhaps indefinitely. Most significantly, I began to forget what it felt like to be normal. The compromises I was making in my activities became acceptable and natural.

Normal becomes pleasure … for a time. Today, now that I’m fixed up, normal feels better than normal. However, with each passing day, I have to remind myself of how good it feels to climb stairs or get out of the car without wincing. I was always conscious of the pain, but I’m not always conscious of the absence of pain.

B2B Sales and Pain

Are there any lessons here? I think so.

woman in painFirst of all, I think it’s safe to say every company has pain – those nagging problems that just don’t go away. So, when prospects seem irrational, or reluctant to move away from their pain, perhaps it’s the pain itself that’s causing the behavior. Like it did to me, the distraction of pain might be messing with their head. Perhaps they are wedded to their pain. Above all, don’t be put off by negative vibes – it may be the pain talking, not your prospect.

So how do you talk to a customer in pain? You can’t assume that in the mind of the customer, normal is a given. Perhaps they’ve forgotten what normal feels like. So paint them a picture. Show them, remind them, take them through step by step, what life is like when backorders are under control and servers aren’t crashing every other day. And put emotion into your words. Pain has trouble grappling with pure ideas. Pain needs comfort and reassurance and perhaps the distraction of a good joke or cartoon.

Don’t assume satisfied customers will stay satisfied. Pain is always top of mind. But like me, a customer who is not feeling pain may take normal for granted. Reselling customers is important – we all know that. But what we may not know is that customers want to be resold. You shouldn’t feel as though you’re wasting the customer’s time or annoying him when you resell your wares. I would love to have a little sales rep on my shoulder saying “Brad! Notice how cool it feels to get out of the car without cringing!” every time I get out of the car. Don’t overdo the reselling, but do it.

Sellers don’t need to make extravagant claims. When you’re in pain, you don’t need ecstasy. Normal is just fine, thank you. My doctor didn’t have to suggest I’d be slalom skiing in the Winter Olympics to sell me on the arthroscopic procedure. All he had to do was tell me I would be able to “resume normal activities”. In the same way, if you identify the prospect’s pain, don’t oversell your cure, thinking it will inspire action. It might not. On a certain level, pain is comfortable because it is a known quantity and it is familiar. The more radical the cure, the more unbelievable the outcome, the more likely the prospect will stay with the familiar. On the other hand, we all want to be normal – that’s not risky. And it’s realistic. And it’s buyable.

Sellers know it’s easier to sell on the basis of relieving pain than offering gain. However, for a company, just like for me, the pain is always there. So when you’re selling gain, you still have to deal with pain, even if it’s completely disconnected from what you are selling. When I was a b2b buyer, I can recall many internal conversations about a knockout sales proposal that went something like this -

“It sure is a great idea, but we’ve got so many problems going on over there and over there, we just can’t take on any more risk.”

“But it’s a great idea!”

“Yeah, but let’s clear up all this other stuff first.”

Remember – when a prospect in pain, the last thing they want is more pain. And risk, after all, is an opportunity for pain. How do you deal with that as a sales person? I’m not really sure. How would you handle this problem of pain with a prospect?