Can I Move Prospects from Comfort Zone to Crisis Mode?

In order to sell, your client has to be in crisis mode, which means they have to make a decision. Inconveniently, not very many clients are already in crisis mode. So, to help your clients understand that they are unsatisfied, you (the seller) have to ask the right questions.

This post details just what questions our corporate sales training teaches that you should ask.

Impact Questions are the place where the seller really starts to help the client moved from their satisfied complacency into crisis mode, and that is when they are likely to make a change.

Crisis Mode

It might seem obvious, but buyers actually do realize when they are in crisis mode. That’s what gives them enough urgency to actually make a change. Usually, this is the case when the buyer has reached out to you.

When we reach out to buyers, we will very seldom find them already in crisis mode. If they realized they were in crisis, they would have already made a move to get out of crisis.

This is why, even though we are the ones reaching out, we should actually be looking for buyers who are already “satisfied.” It’s our job as sellers to move them into crisis, and Program on Persuasion’s corporate sales training teaches sellers how to move them in to crisis. We call it showing the buyers how to discover urgency.

We can only help buyers discover urgency, though, through revealing that your prospects do have potential significant problems or real opportunities.

Comfort Zone

The best way to discover the urgency is through asking Impact Questions. Impact Questions establish the cost of not fixing the problems that we isolated during the Problem/Opportunity Questions phase. After all, if there is no cost, then there is no problem.

Be careful: when we find a problem or opportunity, it will be the seller’s tendency to move into solution. Instead, we replace that habit with moving into Impact Questions.

Impact Questions reveal the negative consequences associated with not fixing the problem or achieving the opportunities. The purpose is to help the buyer discover the pain. They must realize the pain associated with staying in their comfort zone, and from there, gradually make the shift into crisis mode.

As the seller, we need to make sure that the buyer evaluates the cost of the problem before they evaluate the cost of our solution. This is why we don’t discuss our solution until the buyer fully realizes the cost of the problem.

Examples of Impact Questions

Here are a few examples of effective Impact Questions:

  1. What are consequences of not fixing the problem?
  2. How does that impact your customer?
  3. How frequently does that occur?
  4. Does this affect employee morale?
  5. Does this have the potential to hurt your reputation?

So What?

The role of the Impact Question is to help the buyer discover the effect of their problem. We try to answer the question, is this something that warrants making a change? The consequences must be real. If there is no seriousness to the problem, offering a solution to that problem would be fruitless. The buyer will not take a solution that does not warrant effort.

We should avoid, however, telling the buyer what is urgent. Our corporate sales training stresses that changes must be the prospect’s ideas. They have the answers, but we—the sellers—have the questions. Forcing the answers is not our role. Our role is to help the buyers think through which problems and opportunities—if left unaddressed—have the potential to have serious costs.

Conclusion

The role of the salesperson is to move the prospect from their Comfort Zone to Crisis Mode through discovering urgency. The best way to do that is through asking Impact Questions such as the ones in this post in order to show the prospect that, actually, they are not comfortable. They actually are in crisis, but they didn’t know it until you showed them.

 

Image by Luis Llerena.