Top 5 Questions to Ask a Potential Customers about their Pain Points

It's common practice for us to meet a prospect and to spend time with them only to realize that they just didn't buy. This isn't productive and does not contribute to anyone's bottom line.

In actuality selling to people who can't or won't buy are a big dent to your sales productivity, budget and team. Top two-percenters need to spend time only with prospects who need your help, want your help, and are willing to work with you to solve their problems. The most important distinction that you need to make about your prospects include identifying that they have the authority and money to make those decisions. However, one particular item out trumps even those, and it is business pain. 

Examples of Business Pain Points

If your prospects say they are experiencing some employee dissatisfaction and retention issues that are impacting their productivity and hiring, customer churn is impacting their productivity and hiring. Pain is the first thing that top salespeople look for in their prospects.

1. Positioning Pain Points

what company doesn't need to acquire more or better business? What's holding their marketing and positioning efforts back. Here are some examples of what you might hear from psopects who have positioning pains.

• No one knows who our company is
• Our competitors are outspending us
• The market is changing / leaving us behind
• Until now we haven't considered digital marketing so we're behind

2. Productivity Pain Points

Is there something that is stopping a company and its employees from working efficiently and effectively? Your product or service might be able to help them solve these issues.

3. Financial Pain Points

Money is the biggest topic in business and is the hardest resources to acquire. There is often a lacking of it and the requirement to solve it is also very high. 

• We're not selling enough to keep the lights on
• Revenue is up but profitability is low
• We don't have enough visibility to know if we're making good financial decisions
• We may be overpaying for equipment and tools, but we don't know what to cut.

4. People Pain Points

People are the heart of every business, and often constitutes the largest expense but is also representative of the company's largest asset class.

• Employee morale is low
• We lose our best employees to higher-paying positions elsewhere
• Our lack of diversity leads to a lack of innovative ideas
• We can't trust our middle managers to train and motivate our employees

5. Process Pain Points

Operational problems also plague businesses on a day-to-day basis and your prospects know that the best way to achieve repeatable success is by implementing a repeatable process.

• Our hiring process is unwieldy and we struggle with finding highly qualified candidates
• Customer churn rate is high because our service department is inundated and can't keep up.
• We have no system in place to qualify leads
• There are inconsistencies in each employee's workflow which leads to disorganization and varying performance.

Conclusion

You're losing deals because you often are not addressing the prospect's very specific pain points. Identify these and you will be well on your way to delivering true value to your prospects and closing more sales.