I confess.  I’m a strong proponent of the school of thought that “telling isn’t selling.”  When I have my customer hat on in both my personal and professional lives, few things annoy me more than amateurish sales people who launch right into their song and dance without ever bothering to find out from me what my needs are.  If the sales person doesn’t care what my needs are, then I assume this reflects the attitude of their entire company – and I certainly don’t want to be their customer.

I’m becoming a little concerned though that we’re now raising a generation of sales people who miss the whole point and are so hyper focused on the prospect’s wishes that they’ve lost the art of actually SELLING.  The goal behind asking prospects questions is to (a) get the customer to articulate (and hear themselves saying it) why they are dissatisfied with the current status quo – i.e. get them to fully recognize that they have a need which must be fixed – and (b) gain an understanding of their pains so that we, the sales people, can then speak to how we can solve those pains.  The key is that we’re looking for fundamental, emotional pains.  We’re not looking for nickel and dime features the prospect wishes they had, and most importantly, if we can solve their fundamental emotional pains, this is what we sell.   Sure, a prospect may wish we had feature A or feature B which we don’t have, but we do not need to have those features to actually sell to the prospect if we can in fact solve their fundamental pains.

Waving your hands and bemoaning the fact that you can’t sell to your prospect without feature A or B is pure bunk as long as you can solve their most important pains.  If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone of our current customers.  Every single one of them wished we had at least one more additional feature, but at some point when you’re building a new company and a new product or service you have to decide when it is good enough to start selling – as long as your core product or service is ready to meet the big whopping needs out there in the market.  Additional features will come with time, but if you can meet your prospects’ significant pains today, then you’re ready to start SELLING today.