Opportunity or Pain?
Unpacking deals with "no pain"
It's always satisfying getting that "aha" moment when you unlock the pain of a business challenge. It's gratifying to understand the buyer’s emotions and help them navigate to overcoming it. If you’re wondering … yes, the commission checks are nice too.
Less talked about is the other side of pain: Opportunity
This is much more challenging to unpack. Pain is what sales people look for. But, you have to probe more for what's influencing this. It could be a range of things including but not limited to:
Emotions
New executive hires
More efficiencies
The best case scenario is that these are responses simply masking what actually is the pain. In these scenarios you have to challenge a prospect for a compelling “why”.
I recently had a call with a large enterprise and based on all their financials, 10k, annual report, executive interviews, the company is doing VERY well.
Makes you wonder …. why change?
"I've been reading your annual reports and 10k, all aspects of your business are growing steadily YoY and you’re the market leader in all of your categories - why change?”
You probably won't get a direct answer, as I did:
"We all want to strive to be better and set up best practices. I’ve recently been tasked, along with Sr VP and CXO, to lead this initiative in setting up a Center of Excellence across these GTM functions.”
More often than not, you have to cut past aspirational. If it is in fact aspirational - WHO is driving it and WHY.
The end to the story ends up being a mix of what I describe below. But I wanted to share how I think about opportunity or upside in a deal - along with how I research and question it:
It typically comes down to three things:
New leadership (who)
Emotions (why)
Masking Pain
How to Unpack
Signals
In my opinion the best opportunity there is for change is when leadership changes. It signals either a change in vision, or someone with decision making power creates urgency about a shift in strategy.
I won’t dive too deep into all “trigger events” but here are some to keep a pulse on key leadership throughout my accounts:
ZoomInfo Workflows
Credit: BowTiedSalesSystems
LinkedIn Sales Navigator (buyer intent isn’t that great on this but I’ll check it out anyway. Biggest things I look out for are the account news + decision makers).
Google Alerts
Old school tactic to keep up to date on all accounts (named) that need attention and fed right into the ol’ inbox for some quick reads on what’s the buzz.
A thread on B2B outbound:
This is overall a great thread on outbound but TSG provides awesome tips on intent signals along with data enrichment. You can use these for doing your research and ultimately help you craft pointed questions to understand if there’s really a path to to an opportunity where there is upside for the prospect.
Credit: TechSalesGuy
Emotions
One of the other aspects I’ve been playing with isn’t just understanding what challenges a prospect has but also what are their fears? What are the emotions attached to buyers and personas?
Kyle Asay of MongoDB does a great job of this and I’ve provided the link below to his free course on this.
Concerns and Fears in ChatGPT
I did something similar and just added a quick prompt asking for concerns or fears associated with each title I prospect into.
”Could you provide me with the concerns or fears associated with (Director, Lead, Manager, CXO, VP etc.)?”
You can then prompt ChatGPT to align this into a matrix and add rows of other titles that come to mind. You can modify or cross reference with your own intel as needed.
Masking Pain
If none of these are the case, it personally makes me nervous as a seller that there isn’t enough motivation to make change and you enter the territory of simply sticking with the status quo.
Humans by their very nature are more motivated by loss than they are by gain. Otherwise known as loss aversion.
Loss aversion was a term coined by Daniel Kahneman and his associate Amos Tversky in 1979. “Losses loom larger than gains” implies that people by nature are aversive to losses and tend to avoid them.
For example, given a choice between Option A: 50% chance of winning and 50% chance of winning nothing and Option B: winning something for sure, the studied respondents were more likely to choose option B despite the higher expected value of option A.
What fascinates me about communication is that it can be confusing, unclear, and muddy. Asking hard, pointed questions help pull out the truth. In dealing with people, hard questions pull out the true motivations of a person. Outside of sales, asking good questions and being curious is a good life skill to have.
If there’s none of the above - no leadership or emotions that are driving to change then it’s fair game to call it out. I’d rather be blunt and not waste my time.
Only two things will happen:
Your prospect will sell for you
You just know this isn’t worth your time.
The end of this story ends up being a mix of both leadership changes and emotions.
It finally surfaced that there was an area of their GTM process that was inefficient. Setting up best practices could help provide a stopgap on the amount of money they were losing in their production process.
More importantly, the CMO, along with a newly appointed COO, had tasked this committee. I was speaking with the person who was tasked to own the initiative.
There’s still more to unpack but three things I feel good about:
1. There is a business challenge.
2. My prospect is tasked with this initiative, with it the emotions of ownership and seeing success.
3. New leadership is driving this.
My take away in all this?
Ask the hard questions you might not like the answer to. It will make communication clear. It’s tempting to feel good about a logo with deep pockets showing interest in your product, but it’s even better to not waste your time.
If you have questions, shoot a note over to andrew@hackingsales.xyz.
As always, thank you for tuning in and see you all next week.
-Andrew K