Why People Buy

When you begin a conversation with a prospect, you start by building bonding and rapport. With this connection established, you can move toward the Pain Step by establishing an up-front contract with the prospect. Among other things, the up-front contract dictates that you both are committing to a certain amount of time to go over his agenda as well as yours.

- Greg Nanigian

By the way, because you established a good up-front contract, the prospect has agreed on one of two possible outcomes after the meeting before it’s even begun. Either you’ll schedule another meeting to move forward, or you’ll agree that you don’t have a match and part as friends. As an alternative, you may agree in the up-front contract that by end of that particular meeting you will decide to work together and move forward with the purchase/ sale, or you will close the file and part as friends. Again, you will always leave every sales call with a yes, a no, or a clear next step, such as another scheduled meeting.

the pain funnel in action

With the ground rules established, let’s take a look at an example of a salesperson who works for a contractor in the business of building navigation systems for fighter jets. This salesperson has gotten in front of a buyer, Henry Jones, who has an engineering background and a very technical approach. As you’ll notice, the salesperson is going to use questions from the Pain Funnel to understand the prospect better and logically move him toward a sale. Watch how at the start the questions are broad and intellectual and then narrow in on more specific and emotional elements. This allows the prospect to grasp the problem and really see how it is affecting his company as well as himself individually.

Henry asks, “Can you design a system that will easily retrofit our F-16s so that rewiring will not be problematic?”