7 ways to use pain to win more print business
Pain made me buy a new camera recently
I’ve been taking more and more photographs over the past few months. Gradually, I’ve been using more and more of the features on my old compact. Recently I got to the point where I couldn’t actually get the results I wanted with my camera. It was time for a new one.
There’s an important issue to recognize here. I didn’t buy a new camera because of all the features that it had. I bought it because my old camera didn’t have features that I needed. I bought the camera because I was facing problems in getting the results that I wanted from my photography.
When it comes to business, people are just the same: they buy on pain
If your clients feel like this they are more likely to buy
Here’s an example. People buy my book “How To Stop Print Buyers Choosing On Price” because it focuses on a problem that they face. I deliberately gave the book this title because this is exactly what most printing companies talk to me about. I would sell less copies of the book if I called it “How To Sell More Print”.
In the same way, the most successful sales people use pain in their message. They don’t tell prospects why their company is better than the competition. They talk about the problems that their prospects face. They talk about how they can reduce or eliminate those problems.
But it’s all very well having a message like this. It only works if you constantly reinforce this message in peoples’ minds.
Here are seven places where you should be talking about the prospect’s pain
- In your elevator pitch
- On the homepage of your website
- In the summary of your social media profile
- Throughout your sales letter
- On every page of your brochure
- In case studies
- Through your client testimonials
If you reinforce pain in all these areas, you’ll find it a lot easier to make the sale.
“Here are 7 places where you should be talking about the prospect’s pain” https://t.co/IUUvdwOqOp
— Matthew Parker (@PrintChampion) January 14, 2016
However, there’s a very important question that many people ask me. Whenever I talk about pain at conferences, during training workshops or on mentoring calls, the same concern comes up again and again.
How do you find out about the prospect’s pain?
There’s actually a very simple answer to this question: talk to your exiting customers. The issues that they face are almost always the same as other similar companies. So if you talk to, for instance, a small charity you will have a pretty good idea of the problems faced by similar small charities. You’ll be in an ideal position to sell to other small charities on pain.
What do you do next if you want to sell on pain?
- There are three things you should do if you want to create a sales message based on pain:
- Buy “How To Stop Print Buyers Choosing On Price”: you learn a simple sales system based around pain that is very easy to implement
- Talk to an existing customer and ask them about the business pain they face
Create a checklist of pains that they talk about that you can use when you are talking to prospects with a similar profile
Remember to avoid features and benefits
People don’t buy on features and benefits. It wasn’t the feature list that encouraged me to buy a new camera.
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