Identifying Pain

1Why this session is company-wide

This is your copy to keep. The gold Going deeper boxes go past what the session covers, for anyone who wants the fuller picture.

Everybody here takes in complaints. They arrive in a ticket, on the phone, in a hallway at a client site, and in a first meeting with somebody thinking about moving providers. This session is about what you do with one after you have heard it. The sales part is the third step of the seven: bonding and rapport, up-front contract, pain, budget, decision, fulfillment, post-sell. The ticket part is two questions you can start asking on Monday.

The prerequisite is sessions 01 to 03, and three things from those carry into this one. The system finishes either at a signed agreement or at a closed file, and both are finishes. Steps three, four and five are the qualification steps, which answer whether there is a real problem, real money and a real decision. An up-front contract is an agreement made before a conversation about what it is for, how long it runs, and what happens at the end of it.

The method here comes from the Sandler Foundations course. The examples, the questions and everything about how it applies here are ours. The chapter PDFs are in the reference folder of this program if you want the source.

2What pain means here

Pain is the compelling reason a client has to do something about a problem. That is the whole definition, and it is the word this method uses whether the reason is a problem or an opportunity.

The word is a term of art, which means it is a label this method puts on a specific thing rather than an ordinary use of the word. It is not a claim about how anybody feels, and it is not something we try to create in a client. A practice manager can describe a four month outage problem in a completely level voice and have as much pain as anyone you will meet. Somebody can be visibly annoyed about their printer and have none, because they decided last year to live with it. The test is whether there is a reason to act, and the volume of the complaint does not tell you.

Why it gets its own session: an opportunity where the client has no compelling reason to act does not close, and every hour spent on it is gone. An assessment, a proposal and three follow-ups spent on a client who was never going to move is work we paid for and got nothing back from.

3Deciding who does not become a client

Some of the people we meet should not end up as clients. The job in this step is to try to disqualify the person in front of you, not to persuade them. You go looking for the reason this is not a fit, and if you look honestly and cannot find one, you have qualified them.

That sounds backwards, so here is what it buys. Persuading somebody produces a client who agreed to something they did not want, which shows up later as an unhappy account that leaves at the first renewal. Disqualifying produces an answer in one meeting instead of four.

Two conditions have to be true before we commit time to an assessment, a proposal, or a presentation:

1. We tried to disqualify the opportunity and could not. There is a real problem, with a real reason behind it, landing on a real person.
2. The person we are talking to is in a position to say yes or no. Not a person who will carry it to somebody else and retell it shorter.

The obvious objection is that this is a way of turning away work. Our core focus is rescuing neglected IT for organizations of 10 to 200 people. Time spent on somebody who will not act is time not spent on somebody who will, and disqualifying finds that out in one meeting rather than four.

4The four buying motives

There are four reasons a client acts. Two of them are problems and two of them are gains.

A problem now is the one to look for first, every time. The other three all ask the client to act on a forecast, and a forecast is easy to postpone.

When a prospect opens with a gain, do not argue with it. Note it, then go looking for a problem now underneath it, by asking what happens today that they wish did not happen. There usually is one, and it is usually why they called.

5Three levels, worked on one complaint

Start with the complaint, not the rule. A practice manager at a medical practice says, in a first meeting, "our computers are slow".

What she said. Six words. It is a symptom, and it is where almost every conversation about it stops. Quoting six new machines against that sentence would be fast, wrong and billed.

What is underneath it. Asked when it happens and when it does not, she says it is not every computer. It is the six machines at the front desk, only when the practice management system is open, mostly in the morning. Asked what changed around the time it started, she says the software vendor moved that system to a hosted server about four months ago. Nobody changed the internet connection underneath it, and the practice still runs one connection with nothing to fall back to. That is a different job from the one the first sentence described.

What it is doing to her. Asked who ends up dealing with it, she says she does. She has been arriving early to reboot machines before patients arrive. She raised it with the practice owner twice and was told to get quotes. Asked what happens if it is the same in six months, she says she is the one who will be asked why it was never fixed. That is the level that decides whether anything happens at all.

Asked to put a number on the waiting, she gives one. The arithmetic, marked as a model example rather than a real account: six people at the front desk, about 15 minutes a day each spent waiting. 6 times 15 is 90 minutes a day. 90 minutes across 5 days is 450 minutes a week. 450 divided by 60 is 7.5 hours a week. Over four weeks, 7.5 times 4 is 30 hours a month. It is her number, in her units, and it is what a price gets compared against later.

What was just done has a name. The three levels of pain:

All three have to be clear before this step is finished. The working rule behind it: the problem a client names first is rarely the one that has to be solved.

6Getting from the complaint to the impact

These are our questions, grouped by which level they are aimed at. They are not a script. Reading a fixed list at a client sounds like a form being filled in, which is the fastest way to stop somebody talking. Pick the ones that fit the conversation you are in.

One habit matters more than the wording: ask, then stop talking. The answer that gets you to the second or third level usually arrives after a silence that feels far too long to you and normal to them. Filling it with a suggestion turns the client into somebody agreeing with us, and an agreement is not information.

One thing not to do here: do not start listing what we do. Naming our tools and our stack before you know what the problem costs hands the client a specification to compare, and the comparison then happens on price, in a room we are not in.

7What this changes on a ticket

A Syncro ticket that reads "Outlook keeps crashing, third time this month" is a level one description. It says what the symptom is and nothing else, which is enough to start a fix and not enough to stop the fourth one.

Two questions, added at intake or on the first call back, change what that ticket is worth:

Both answers go in the ticket, in the words the user used, and the cause belongs in Hudu, our documentation system, so the next person does not rediscover it. If we make those two questions standard on intake, the wording belongs in a ticket intake standard operating procedure, or SOP, in Notion rather than on this page.

8Reviewing pain back to the client

When you have all three levels, you say the whole thing back before you go anywhere near money. Five parts, in order:

1. Every problem, in their words. All of them, not the one you find most interesting.
2. What it is costing, in their numbers. The 30 hours a month figure from section 5 is hers, not ours, which is why it will survive being repeated to somebody else.
3. What continues if nothing changes. Not a threat. The consequence they already described, said back plainly.
4. A direct question. "Have I got all of it, or is there something I have missed."
5. A spoken confirmation. Wait for words. A nod is not confirmation, and neither is the absence of a correction.

The reason to do this when you already have the information written down: the summary is not for us. It is the one point where the client hears the whole thing in one piece and either confirms it or corrects it. A correction there costs the rest of the sentence; the same correction after a proposal means rewriting the proposal. And a client who has said out loud that the problem is real and costs what they said has agreed to the problem before any price exists, so the price is compared against their number.

The confirmed summary goes into Nutshell, our customer relationship management (CRM) system, in the client's sentences, so the proposal, the agreement in PandaDoc and the first BTR all use the same words. Only once it is confirmed do you move on to what they are able to invest, which is session 06.

9Practice on a real complaint

1. Pick one real complaint you have heard from a client in the last month. A ticket, a phone call, something said at a site. Not a scenario you made up.
2. Write the surface problem in the client's exact words.
3. Get the reason behind it, on a live conversation rather than from memory. Use the level two questions in section 6.
4. Get the personal impact, and name the person. Use the level three questions. If you cannot name a person and what it does to them this week, you are not at level three yet.
5. Get one number and write the arithmetic next to it, the way section 5 does, so the count is visible rather than estimated.
6. Summarise it back using the five parts in section 8, and write down what they said when you asked whether you had missed anything.
7. Write the four buying motives and the three levels out from memory and check them against sections 4 and 5.

10Check for understanding

1. A prospect says they want to move to Microsoft 365 because the practice down the road did it and it looks modern. Which of the four buying motives is that, and what do you do next?

2. A client says their email keeps ending up in the recipient's spam folder. Give one question that gets you to level two and one that gets you to level three, and say what each is for.

3. A prospect lists nine problems in the first meeting and asks us to fix all of it. Are they qualified?

4. Name the two conditions that must be true before we build a proposal. Why is a person with a serious, expensive, well documented problem still not qualified if they cannot say yes or no?

5. A Syncro ticket reads "Outlook keeps crashing, third time this month". Give the two questions that move it past a surface description, and say what each one buys.

6. You have all three levels written down and you are ready to talk about money. Why summarise it back and wait for the client to confirm, when you already have the information?

11Before the next session

• Do the practice steps in section 9 and bring the complaint, the three levels, the number with its arithmetic, and what the client said when you summarised it back.
• Know the four buying motives and the three levels from memory, and which motive is strongest.
• Optional. Chapter 4 of the Sandler Foundations workbook in the reference folder, which has the pain funnel graphic in its original form.

Next session. 05 - Questioning Strategies. How to ask so that people keep talking, what to do with a question you cannot answer without giving away the work for free, and negative reverse selling, which is deliberately taking the opposite side of what a salesperson is expected to push for in order to get the truth on the table.

12Glossary

Pain

The compelling reason a client has to do something about a problem. A term of art in this method, not a statement about anybody's feelings.

Pain indicator

The surface problem a client leads with. Level one of three.

Buying motive

One of the four reasons a client acts: a problem now, a problem coming, a gain now, a gain later.

Three levels of pain

The surface problem, the reason behind it, and the personal impact on the person in front of you.

Personal impact

What the problem does to the specific person you are talking to. Their hours, their credibility, what they will be asked about later.

Pain Funnel

Sandler's name for their own questioning progression from symptom to impact. Presented as a graphic in the source chapter and not reproduced here.

Disqualifying

Deliberately looking for the reason an opportunity is not a fit, so that the ones left over are real.

Qualification

Steps three, four and five together: establishing a real problem, real money and a real decision.

Up-front contract

An agreement made before a conversation about what it is for, how long it runs, and what happens at the end.

BTR

Business technology review, our recurring account meeting with a client.

13Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 4, Identifying the Reasons for Doing Business (Pain): chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The term pain as used here, the four buying motives, the three levels and the name Pain Funnel are Sandler's. The question progression on these pages, the medical practice example, the arithmetic and everything about how this applies at Hermetic are ours. The pain funnel graphic itself is in the chapter PDF and is not reproduced here.