The best pain funnel questions, asked at the wrong time, will lose you a deal you might have won if you’d asked them in the right order.
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Popular sales training company Sandler uses the term ‘pain funnel questions’ to describe thequestions a sales person should ask. I’m going to show you today that their questions are good enough. If you master these good-enough questions, you'll go a long way to succeeding in sales. And if ‘good enough’ is good enough, then have a go at mastering probing questions. But if you want to excel, and to align Sales with Marketing, then you’ll also need to master one more skill. More of that in this week’s show.
Pain funnel questions from Sandler
Here are the questions straight from Sandler.com
- What have you tried before to fix the problem we’re discussing?
- Tell me more.
- Did that eliminate the problem?
- Why do you suppose that didn’t work?
- Why did you choose that approach the last time you made this decision?
- What was the key issue that caused the alternatives to be ruled out?
- Why was that the key issue?
- Why was it so critical?
- What lessons came out of the experience?
- How much did it cost you?
- What was most important to you personally?
- How did it make you feel?
- Have you given up trying to fix the problem?
- How will your earlier experiences affect the decision on the solution you choose?
- What will you do differently when choosing a vendor this time?
- How committed are you personally to resolving the problem….not how committed is your boss or your team……..YOU?
- Is there anything else I should know that would be helpful?
Just read through the list of questions. These are not simple, as clearly they’re not yes-no questions. They’re open questions. That’s great. They really are good probing questions. They’re similar in a lot of ways to challenger selling, and simply mastering these questions will help you succeed. But let me point out a small flaw in these questions. It’s a small flaw, but it's also critical. Here it is.
Situation, gap or need?
These questions explore the gaps the target business faces, the implications of those gaps, questions about what is needed to fix those gaps, and some hygiene questions. All of these are good, but they’re not all the same thing, and they’re probably not for the same meeting. In gap acknowledged, if we draw a little from the SPIN methodology, you’d know that there’s the problem and there's the implication. Problem questions like, "Have you given up trying to fix the problem?", and "How committed are you personally to resolving the problem?" Great questions. And, they’re all about the problem.
Then, "What lessons came out of the experience?" and "How much did it cost you and how did that make you feel?" These are really implication questions. Then, we move into, "What have you tried before to fix the problem we’re discussing?" Again, it’s a good question because what you’re trying to flush out is what they think they need, why it didn’t work, so you can reshape the need. Great questions, but they’re all about the need, and there’s also some general hygiene questions. "Is there anything else I should know that would be helpful?" It’s just a good question to ask in almost any meeting.
Read the full version here: [ Ссылка ]
Relevant links:
- Sandler's Pain Funnel: Getting Beneath the Surface [ Ссылка ]
- Miller Heiman Conceptual Selling [ Ссылка ]
