Big Ahha

I was reminded yesterday of something I had tucked away in my mind from my days as a Sales Executive for a financial services company.

A friend of mine in the web services industry told me a story of how he was driving with his family in an unfamiliar area. As things can and do go wrong when we least expect them, the fuel light was and had been on indicating he was running on fumes without a whole lot of development in sight. He finally came across someone to ask and found a gas station just before running out of gas. As you can well imagine it was not a very pleasant time for my friend. He probably was feeling all sorts of emotions but definitely he was feeling some fear and thus pain.

Now do you think that when he got to the gas station he saw the price and decided he should keep looking for a better deal? Absolutely not. He was feeling sufficient pain that he would have paid more than the going rate for gasoline.

What we can take away from this is that when looking at potential customers it is often easier to help a customer who is feeling real pain in their business. Many times you may find a potential client who is “thinking about a website” and you end up spending a lot of time convincing them they need one, convincing them it is worth paying for and convincing them how much they should spend. In other words they are not feeling enough pain to take the action to help themselves. While it is not easy to walk away from potential work sometimes it is for the best.

The sales training I mentioned earlier was a theory that you need to help the customer understand the pain they are experiencing. While that works in some instances I also can recall a number of experiences where no matter how many times you try to help a customer or a business they ultimately need to help themselves by embracing the need for change in their organization.