In his new book about psychology and economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow, author Daniel Kahneman writes that objective observers are “more likely to detect our errors than we are.”
What a relief! We all know prospects don’t buy until they believe they have a problem, so it’s reassuring that salespeople can still play a vital role in pointing them out.
But believing a problem exists only initiates the great trifecta for buyer motivation—believe-care-act! So simple to say, but so hard to execute. Within those hyphens lurks heaps of uncertainty. For example, what happens—as it often does—when prospects don’t perceive their problems with the same clarity we do?
Well, we ask questions. We uncover pain, and figure out what keeps customers up at night. The gorier the pain, the higher the buyer motivation! Then it’s sell! Sell! Sell! If pain exists, we’ll root it out, write it down, quantify it, monetize it, and propose a solution! Inefficiency, under-performance, old technology, obsolescence, persistent errors, under-staffing, over-staffing, customer churn. The list stretches to infinity, you just have to know where to look.
Whoa! Slow down, because there’s a problem. We’re making connected assumptions that are logically shaky.
1. The pain we see is pain that matters to our prospect.
2. Pain that matters must be reduced or eliminated.
3. There’s motivation to do things differently.
What undermines these assumptions is the truth that prospects cope with pain every day. Call it The Ties that Bind. Call it “no decision.” Call it unrequited sales love. Ties that bind enable prospects to cling to old, decrepit systems. Some prospects adapt so well that their pain is almost invisible—to them. When it comes to prospect pain, salespeople are right on top of it, but discovering the ties that bind can be much more complicated. Here’s my story:
In 1996, one of my prospects was a large Virginia-based food distributor. On my first sales call there, I observed fifty or so forklifts buzzing throughout the large central warehouse in a chaotic beehive of commerce. As forklift operators picked and moved large pallets, they manually keyed a 10-digit ID number into the mobile terminals installed on each lift truck. Ten digits, every pick, three shifts, thousands of times each day. I was aghast.
Understand that while skilled forklift operators possess amazing competencies, you’ll find keyboard data entry way down the list, after ballet and vegetarian cooking. There was huge opportunity for inventory errors. My colleague and I asked the VP of Operations why he didn’t address the problem by simply barcoding the ID number and installing scanners on each forklift terminal. “Well, that would cost us money!” he exclaimed with finality.
Swat! He deflected our pithy question as reflexively as brushing off an annoying mosquito. In a rare moment, I was absolutely speechless. My reaction can only be compared to that of Barbara Walters when she recently asked Herman Cain what role he would like in government. There’s more to the story, but based on its trajectory, you can predict the rest. And you’re correct.
I know. You’ve already thought about how you would extract yourself from the situation. You probably figured out how you would avoid it in the first place. Fair enough. But I will submit that I was looking for opportunity in the wrong place altogether. My product-as-solution zeal blinded me to the fact that the VP of Operations had little pain, and he had nothing to run from. He was . . . unmotivated. Yet, he had a gigantic vulnerability he didn’t perceive, and one that would not have bubbled up from my pain-oriented questions.
Why? Never mind the error-prone, fat-fingered data entry. Inventory accuracy was not his problem. He had a dedicated staff of highly experienced accounting personnel who knew every systemic idiosyncrasy down to the last, tiny detail, and the company adapted their processes to manage their data entry errors. Frequent errors, frequently caught! “Pain? What pain? I love my job! Life is good!” Little wonder the VP found my scanners expensive.
What was the vulnerability lurking in the shadows? Janelle in Accounting couldn’t take a day off, because if she did, Mike in Shipping would likely promise to deliver inventory he didn’t have. And finding more Janelle’s, if you’ll pardon my jargon, doesn’t scale. So to any VP of operations in a slow-growth business, things would probably stay hunky dory until the day after Janelle’s retirement party, following the speech thanking her for 25 years of uninterrupted, error-free service.
No wonder businesses today call employees Human Talent. The same kindness oozes into the annual report, in crisp black and white: “Our greatest asset is our people!” Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a reason for that! RIF’d, outsourced, and often misunderstood, human talent still does one thing remarkably well: cope with operational pain. Ties that bind, thanks to tacit knowledge, Excel spreadsheets, patience, and thick skin. And this is why many times prospects say, “no thanks—we’re perfectly happy with what we already have.”
Find the pain, make the sale. But not always, we now know. Another immutable sales truism, shattered. Fortunately, physicist Eli Goldratt, originator of the Theory of Constraints, offered a useful pair of operational questions in his book, The Goal:
1. What is the limitation that the proposed solution diminishes?
2. How does the organization currently compensate for, or deal with the limitation?
That’s not necessarily an exercise in pain discovery. And by diving deep into those questions, salespeople can uncover opportunities that might not keep decision makers up at night, but are no less important. Drill baby, drill!
Goldratt believed that while every organization faces limitations, it’s best to concentrate on ones that are strategically consequential. Still, all limitations have workarounds, and some are pain-free or, as we say in IT, “good enough.” Other workarounds are a cobbled together befuddlement of people and processes that can’t be jettisoned fast enough. So, past “find the pain,” beyond “find the limitations,” the discovery challenge remains the same: how strong are the ties that bind?—because they’re there, and they matter.
For salespeople, identifying opportunities to fix errors and inefficiencies that our products solve becomes easier with time. That’s not necessarily a good thing. As I learned, knee-jerk diagnosis doesn’t always create a pathway to a sale.
Understanding limitations and the strength of ties that bind can be fruitful for identifying opportunities and important prospect risks. As my accounting professor said, “in financial terms, we look at every initiative the same way: if an acquisition returns more value to the company than the status quo, we make the purchase. If it doesn’t, we don’t.”
