Sell It While It Hurts

People make purchases to solve a problem, so sometimes the best time to sell to them is when they’re hurting from their problem.

A Case Study on Pain

We had a client call in today who we’ve done business with for a long time.

They were a little frustrated because there were a number of issues on their website, which we built a number of years ago. These were the kinds of things that just change over time as the internet changes or small from modifications that the client made to the website. They were coming to us to fix these issues, and were frustrated that they were happening. It’s no problem for us to fix issues as they come in, but we like to be able to be proactive in our approach. However in this case, despite multiple requests, we don’t have an ongoing support contract with them. We consult with them when they ask us, and have pitched them multiple times on doing an ongoing contract with us to avoid these kinds of issues as times change.

A sales discussion

The project manager brought up that she thought that we should finish all the things that they asked of us during the meeting and then pitch them on another longterm engagement. She too thought that an ongoing engagement would solve the problem for them and we could all avoid the frustration, lost time, and lost revenue for the client in the future.

The Pain & The Problem

My suggestion was that, instead of doing the work to make them happy quickly and getting past their frustration, was that we pitch it to them right now.

The reason for pitching this again now rather than later is that right now they feel the pain.

Right now, they’re hurting because they have problems, their company is growing, and their website is causing them issues. What’s happened over and over and over again is that we’ve solved everything and then we go back and we pitch them on something else. The sale never worked before because once we fixed the issues, they moved on to the next big issue and put this down. After it’s fixed, it’s no longer an issue.

Sell It While It’s Hurting

So today’s lesson is that you’re solving a pain when you’re doing sales. If somebody’s having a pain right now, then right now is the time to sell the solution, at least most of the time.

What do you think?

If you agree or disagree, post something in the comments! Let me know if you have a different approach to sales and how you do it.