Building and Maintaining Stakeholder Collaboration

Many sales methodologies lean into pain at some point in their process. Business pain points are compelling reminders of why a buyer is looking for solutions in the first place and of where an organization or people struggle. Does this feel uncomfortable to read? Does it feel good to talk about failure, let alone with someone trying to sell you something? 

 

It doesn’t feel good. There are neurological and emotional reasons that these discussions are difficult. However, your prospect came to you because they need help with precise points; to address them, you DO need to talk about them. But how? The best way to discuss pain points is in a collaborative environment where individuals collaborate and problem-solve. How do you get there? Read more. 

 

Challenger, Gap Selling, and MEDICC sales methodologies incorporate pain identification and importance at various points in the sales cycle. Where and how you introduce pain are critically important to client engagement. A pain or organizational failure is part of the selling process in each of these sales processes. You are challenging audience thinking or reminding the audience of the reason they are searching for a solution. This is proven and effective. However, timing is everything when selling using this strategy. What happens when you jump into pain selling too early? 

 

Suppose an account executive or presales consultant broaches the subject of an organizational deficiency without establishing rapport and consent to present to the audience. In that case, they risk rupturing the collaboration between the buyer and seller. When selling, we need to be in a collaborative state physiologically. If we introduce pain before we are fully in a collaborative state, the audience can perceive the approach as criticism and become dysregulated. 

 

How can I, a seller, physically dysregulate a buyer? We regulate physiological reactions and mirror each other in collaborative social interactions. When we collaborate in positive interactions, our breathing may sync, and our heart rates may shift. If we are not in sync when discussing a failure, perceived failure, or problem, we may produce adverse physical reactions that will deregulate buyers. The great news is when we are attuned to our audience, which is part of the 2Win training skillset, we can read dysregulation and reset the engagement to get back on the same page and then try to reframe the pain or the goal of the conversation again. 

How do we appropriately reframe pain as organizational gain? First, if you are already in a conversation and see that your customer or audience has fallen out of collaborative sync, pause to reconnect. Discuss where you are not understanding their use case, ask a question, and show your audience you are trying to understand their organizational objectives. Acknowledge and realign if you have something incorrect. You are never too late to repair a sales engagement.  More questions help you better understand goals, add value to your engagement, and help get a buy-in from the audience for solutions.  When we drill down questions to uncover where they have the problem, we show that we want to gain a true understanding of their challenge. 

Our programs, Storytelling2Win, Winning with Executives, Demo2Win, and Discovery2Win, all train to support sales methodologies that sell with pain. The foundational training is in the soft skills of reading your audience, selling value, identifying problematic themes for clients, and telling stories to solve them. We are building bridges for you to cross and collaborate in client engagements. It is possible to discuss organizational objectives after you have connected with your audience, built a relationship, and shown them you are listening with questions. 

 

If you work within an organization that uses techniques for challenging buyers, consider enrolling in a Demo2Win masterclass. We offer training to connect a pain point with a solution value. See more about our masterclass offerings here.