Parts of this post adapted from the Solution Selling Fieldbook (2005, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 978-0071456074) by Eades, Touchstone and Sullivan.

Imagine for a moment that you have come down with the flu. You feel terrible. You go to your doctor to find some relief. What would you think if your doctor conducted only a cursory examination, asked you no questions, and then threw a prescription at you, saying you’ll probably feel better soon? How confident would you be in that doctor’s diagnosis?

At best, your doctor may have guessed right, and you might get better. At worst, your doctor may be totally wrong, and your illness could develop into something serious, perhaps even life-threatening.

Shoddy diagnosis often leads to poor results. Lawyers call this malpractice.

Unfortunately, we see a lot of malpractice in the sales profession, too. Many salespeople do a poor job diagnosing buyers’ real problems, and as a result, they can prescribe the wrong solutions, or at worst, fail to convince customers that their solutions could be of any benefit at all.

It’s hard for buyers to take action without first having a vision of what to do to solve their problem. The salesperson that accurately diagnoses a buyer’s critical business issues or potential missed opportunity — their “pain” — and who then helps the buyer to create a vision of a solution, most often wins the business.

A sales professional who doesn’t diagnose their buyer’s pain, and then help the buyer to visualize how their capabilities are going to help, unwittingly puts themselves in the position of being just another salesperson. This type of salesperson brings little or no value to the prospective buyer. Like a doctor that just throws pills at his patients without diagnosing them, salespeople that don’t diagnose customer pains are guilty of sales malpractice.

Diagnose before you prescribe

If a buyer doesn’t trust your diagnosis, they won’t trust your prescription. So, what does a good buyer diagnosis look like?

A diagnostic questioning model that serves as a road map for consultative conversations with buyers can be of help. Here are the components of a good diagnostic model:

• Three types of questions:
  • Open
  • Control
  • Confirming
• Exploring three kinds of information:
  • Reasons for the buyer’s pain
  • The scope or impact of the pain
  • The specific capabilities needed to address the pain

Three types of diagnostic questions

Salespeople should ask three types of questions when diagnosing customer pain.  Each type of question solicits different kinds of information, and all are necessary to develop a thorough understanding to the buyer’s critical business issues of potential missed opportunities:

• Open Questions - Open-ended questions invite buyers to talk freely, respond from their experience, knowledge, and points of concern, and earn you the right to ask control questions. They are comfortable questions for buyers to answer because they are typically perceived as non-threatening. They do have one disadvantage; they give control of the conversation over to the buyer. That’s not good if the direction they take has nothing to do with your offering. But early in the buying process, it’s important for buyers to feel comfortable, so you are best advised to start with open questions.
• Control Questions - Control questions are similar to what many people know as closed or closed-ended questions. However, closed questions tend to be answered with a yes or no, whereas control questions tend to elicit more complete responses. Control questions seek specific pieces of information and help guide the buyer in the specific direction you want them to go. Control questions also help to elicit quantitative information about things such as “how much?” or “how often?”
• Confirming Questions - Confirming questions ensure that both the buyer and the salesperson are in sync. Confirming questions help summarize your understanding of buyer responses, demonstrates an ability to listen, show empathy and exhibit expertise. Confirming questions can also help rectify any misunderstanding that may have occurred during a conversation.

Three kinds of diagnostic exploration

Using open, control and confirming questions, sales professionals should explore three types of information in their diagnosis of a buyer’s pain:

• Identify reasons for pain - You attempt to explore and understand all of the contributing factors associated with why the buyer is experiencing the admitted pain. Additionally, you want to diagnose how much, from a quantitative perspective, each reason is contributing to the buyer’s pain.
• Determine impact of the pain - After diagnosing the reasons for pain, you attempt to explore the impact that the buyer’s pain has on other individuals. The intent is to see how pervasive the pain is throughout the organization. This dialogue can serve to verify the full value of solving the problem and addressing the pain.
• Visualize capabilities needed - After having diagnosed the reasons for pain and others impacted, you must now attempt to help the buyer visualize a solution. In a consultative manner, you should vividly describe an vision of how your capabilities might help the buyer address the reasons for their pain.

You can pull the three types of questions and the three kinds of exploration together into a repeatable model for diagnostic conversations with buyers — we call this the 9-Block Vision Processing Model:

The Vision Processing Model provides a useful framework for a thorough diagnostic, consultative discussion with a buyer.  If executed successfully, the seller understands the reasons for the buyer’s critical business issues, the impact those issues are having on the buyer and their organization, and the kinds of capabilities needed to solve the buyer’s problem.  More importantly, the Vision Processing Model also helps buyers to develop a clear vision of a potential solution — one that favors the capabilities that you offer.

In future posts to this blog, we’ll explore the Vision Processing Model in more detail, and provide some examples of how to execute it well.

Good luck and good selling!

Parts of this post adapted from the Solution Selling Fieldbook (2005, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 978-0071456074 by Eades, Touchstone and Sullivan).

Selling a solution to someone that doesn’t think they have a problem is extremely difficult - in fact, it is virtually impossible.  Until the potential buyer admits that they need to change in some way, they will remain happy with the status quo, and simply carry on as they always have.

Getting customers to admit that they have a business issue that needs to be addressed - or a potential missed opportunity if they fail to act - is the first major step towards a successful sale.  How do top performing salespeople help buyers recognize their critical business issues - their pains - and begin the process of trying to solve them?

If you have stimulated the curiosity of a potential customer with a business development prompter, and then shared a suitable reference story (sharing pain to get pain), you can expect prospects to respond in one of five ways:

1. “I’m having that same problem.”
2. “I’m having a different problem.”
3. “I don’t have that problem”, but the prospect is friendly and talkative.
4. “I don’t have that problem”, and the prospect is NOT friendly and talkative.
5. “I have that same problem, and we’re already working on it.”

If the prospect gives you one of the first two responses, congratulations! They have admitted pain (or admitted a different pain than the one you thought they might have), and are ready to move forward towards a potential solution. If you get the first response, you obviously did your homework, and postulated correctly about their business challenge.  If you get the second response, you were not exactly on target, but you have still demonstrated some situational fluency (understanding of the customer’s situation) and therefore earned some credibility, so the prospect is willing to steer you towards the right issue.

If you get the third response - no pain admitted, but the prospect is friendly and talkative - then you need to focus the conversation on a potential pain that you can address. The best way to do this is to ask situation questions to help direct the conversation towards the most relevant pain.  Situation questions are open - they allow prospects to answer freely, and invite further conversation and exploration.  Some examples of situation questions are:

• Today, when your customers want to place an order, what do they do?
• How do your customers get notified about new products or promotions?
• How do your salespeople get referrals from existing customers today?

The fourth response - no pain admitted, and the prospect doesn’t want to share any more information - is certainly the most challenging.  Basically, the prospect is saying, “Stop bothering me, and go away!”  Try to empathize with the prospect, and make it easier for them to respond by offering up some potential pains to which the prospect may relate.  A menu of pain approach may prove useful.  An example of a menu of pain question is: “The top three difficulties we are hearing from VPs of Sales like you are: (1) missing revenue targets, (2) increasing cost of sales, and (3) inability to accuracy forecast sales revenue - how many of these issues, if any, are impacting you today?”  If, after asking menu of pain questions, your prospect still does not admit pain, then it’s probably best to politely disengage.

If you hear the fifth response - agreement with the pain, and they’re already working on it - warning alarms should go off in your head, telling you that this is an active opportunity, and the customer already has a vision of a potential solution.  In other words, you are late entering into this opportunity!  In this case, you should first participate in your prospect’s vision, by asking what they are doing to solve their problem.  Then you can determine if you can re-engineer their vision with additional capabilities - those that favor your solution.  (We’ll cover vision re-engineering dialogues in more detail in a future post.)

Good luck and good selling!