There are two factors that motivate customers to buy. They are pain or pleasure. Pain motivates more than pleasure. Unless your customers are experiencing enough pain there is no reason to do anything about it. Yet, just experiencing pain is insufficient to motivate a customer to do something about it and buy. You have to be very clear about how much pain he’s experiencing. It’s unlikely that you will motivate your customer to buy unless you’ve quantified how much the pain is costing your customer.
If you sell financial products, you’ve questioned to learn that your prospect needs $75,000/ year to maintain his lifestyle. When you examine his current investment strategy you can see that he’s deficient by $15,000/ year. You have just quantified the pain. You can also quantify pain in hours wasted, or other metric if you can’t quantify in dollars what the pain is costing your prospect. The most important predictor of sales success is that you do quantify the pain.
Why not have a sales goal this week of quantifying customer pain before you present your product or service?