Stop Singing for Your Supper

Go where you're needed instead

A few days ago, I got on a discovery call with a prospect. The call was set up by someone in my team. If you’ve been reading these articles, you’ll know just how much I emphasise the importance of connecting with prospects who have a real need for what you offer, even at the pre-discovery stage. My team knows this. I never speak to a prospect unless they present a real need I believe we can solve.

This prospect was unpleasant. Not mildly difficult. Unpleasant. He kept reminding us that we were trying to win his business, and so we needed to get up on stage and show him what we have. Sing for our supper. He is accustomed to the more regular seller. The kind that does a song and dance with the hope that the prospect might bite.

But this is not the Power Listening way. We only go where we’re needed.

I asked him a simple question: do you have any issues with your current provider? He said he doesn’t, but he’s always open to seeing what else might be out there. So I politely reminded him that we have no intention of trying to win his business if he is currently happy where he is. In fact, we applaud that. We insist that he stays with his current provider. Should he ever run into a real problem in future, he is welcome to reach out and we can talk again then.

Unsurprisingly, he changed tack. He started telling us why he was interested in talking to us, but still on the basis that we needed to prove to him why we deserve to breathe oxygen. There was something in particular he wanted from us, something we do well. But when it came down to the nuts and bolts, he wanted it for nothing.

Now, while this call was on the extreme side of things, it highlighted something we all run into when we don’t qualify strictly for need. You wind up with window-shoppers who expect you to prove why you should pay to have them as your customer.

The quiet killer

And while your prospect might have a touch more finesse than mine did, and so it might be a bit harder for you to see behind the veil of pleasantries exchanged during the call, the reality is always the same. There is no other option. It is always this way.

A prospect who doesn’t have real need will not agree to discovery. Not really. They might readily sign up to a discovery call. But when you’re on, they expect a show. “Prove to me why I should listen to you.” They will not comply with the discovery process. They will not cooperate.

As I wrote in Stop Begging Your Prospects, discovery is an intense affair. You have to work through a lot of questions. Unless the prospect is working with you toward the same goal of solving their need, the process becomes agonising for you both. And quite frankly, impossible.

Contrast this with a prospect who has real need. They’re a pleasure to work with. They know they have a problem that must be solved. They’re eager to cooperate to make it go away. The stakes are high for them. They’re willing to do what’s needed.

This is the heart and soul of the Power Listening methodology. You never recommend anything, ever, in the absence of genuine need. If a client doesn’t need your product, you leave them be. If they do, it is your duty to help them by getting them to procure the needful.

But weirdly, few people understand what need actually means. Many equate it to pain. I myself have started to talk more about value than I do about need. So let’s set the record straight, once and for all.

Need is not want

When we talk about need, we’re talking about something the prospect feels they must solve. It isn’t something nice to have. It is essential. Without it, there is a real consequence. Without this condition being met, we’re left with a want.

There’s nothing wrong with a want. People buy based on want all the time. The problem is that a want purchase is a lot more emotional than a need purchase. A person may want that cool t-shirt but may need to buy soap.

In B2B sales cycles, purchases tend to be less emotional and more intellectual. After all, the purchase has to be agreed to by more than one person, forcing the decision to be based on a legitimate business case. For this reason, it serves the B2B seller to accent more on need than want. While there will always be an emotional aspect to the purchase, it shows up to a lesser degree. It well behooves a seller to lay a foundation on need, as this will be the foundation you fall back on through the sales cycle.

Every time a deal stalls, every time a stakeholder pushes back, every time procurement asks you to justify the spend, you return to the need. If it was never there, you have nothing to return to.

Pain and gain

Let’s decompose this further. In a lot of my sales training over the years, I would break the concept of need into two parts: pain and gain. This is another way of getting precise about the difference between needs and wants.

A pain is something the prospect is actively trying to solve right now. Left unattended, there is a current cost or risk that remains unsolved. If nothing changes, the prospect still has a real problem.

A pain could be a malfunctioning billing system resulting in millions of uncollected income each year. It is a leaking pipe that needs to be fixed. It is the car that won’t start. It is the dress with a hole in it.

Then there is a gain. A gain is something the prospect wants to achieve. Sure, one can argue that there is a cost to not having one, but nothing is broken right now. You don’t have a problem on your hands that needs fixing. It is aspirational.

“I want a new CRM with that cool new dashboard feature.” Yes, it is true that your sellers may be less productive without a good CRM. But you don’t have something broken that is resulting in real cost or risk right now. Or consider: “I want a shiny black Porsche even though my current car works.” The new Porsche may give you some stature and possibly even have you fraternise in circles you ordinarily don’t. But the purchase doesn’t solve an actual problem.

This is the trick with a gain. The seller and prospect have to work really hard to find out why it is in fact necessary to move ahead, as nothing is fundamentally bleeding. What is this new CRM going to be able to do that Excel does not do right now? What specific problem does the CEO actually need those real-time dashboards to solve? There is usually a pain lurking somewhere underneath a gain. But you have to do real work to find it.

The expert seller sees through the gain

The expert seller hears an announcement like, “Our CEO is really excited by those new dashboards that let you slice the numbers in real time,” and treats it as a massive clue. Not as a buying signal. A clue.

What problem is that CEO really trying to solve? What is breaking right now that makes real-time data feel urgent? So a gain becomes the gateway to a pain. And when you get to the pain, you treat it the same way as you’d treat any pain in the sales process. It just showed up wearing different clothes, and you had to do some real work to undress it.

And say, despite best efforts, there is still no way to get to a pain underneath a gain. When it is genuinely whimsical, you leave it right there. Don’t pursue it. Don’t get caught up in whims. This is not about contriving a pain when there is none. “Oh, you absolutely deserve a new Tesla wall charger when you don’t even have an EV.”

Tell the prospect they don’t need it.

You might think I’m crazy for suggesting that you drop a sale. But you’ll thank me later, when your prospect has bought from you four times over. Because you were the one person who told them the truth. As I explored in Selling Without the Slime, the sellers who build real practices are the ones who would rather lose a deal than lose their integrity.

The error my team made

To circle back to what happened the other day. My team confused gain for pain. They had added a checkpoint to the pre-discovery call script that tested for gain instead of pain. And because “not having the new thing” can look like a pain, they didn’t catch it. The prospect said something like, “We’d love to explore how we can improve X.” That sounds like need. It even feels like need. But it was a want dressed up as a need.

The problem with testing for gain at pre-discovery is that your net will also catch the window-shoppers. The ones who want you to do a song and dance for them. They have no real impetus to solve anything, so it becomes your job to prove to them that you are worth their time. You are now on stage, performing, hoping they’ll clap.

This is the exact opposite of what Power Listening is designed to do.

Qualify for pain

For this reason, I strongly suggest qualifying for pain at pre-discovery. Not need in the general sense. Pain, specifically.

When your pre-discovery script tests for pain, you are asking: is there something broken right now? Is there a current cost or risk? Is there a consequence that is already being felt?

If yes, you have a prospect you can work with. Someone who will cooperate in discovery because they have a real stake in the outcome. Someone who will answer the hard questions because the answers matter to them too.

If no, if all you have is a gain, an aspiration, a “nice to have,” then you politely acknowledge their interest and move on. You don’t chase. You don’t convince. You don’t sing.

Sure, you will have fewer prospects to work with. But this is a case of quality over quantity. The prospects who remain are the ones you can actually help. And helping, not selling, is the whole point.

The litmus test

Here is a simple test you can apply at pre-discovery. After the prospect tells you what they’re interested in, ask yourself one question: if this prospect does absolutely nothing, what happens?

If the answer is “nothing much, they carry on as before,” you’re looking at a gain. Move on.

If the answer is “they continue to lose money, or miss deadlines, or face regulatory risk, or bleed customers,” you’re looking at a pain. That’s a prospect worth your time. And theirs.

I hope I have been able to demystify this confusing subject of prospect need. The distinction between pain and gain is not academic. It is the difference between spending your days on stage, performing for audiences who never intended to buy a ticket, and spending them with people who need what you have and are grateful that you showed up.

If there is no real need, don’t touch it with a ten foot barge pole.

Make it rAIn, KG