Pain Is Good: How To Use The Strongest Driver of Change To Make More Sales with Jody Williamson at Joe Polish’s Genius Network - Genius Network Episode #123

I want you to have people leaning forward and engaged and interested. And you do that by covering pains that they're experiencing that get them to lean forward.

Jody Williamson knows how to use pain as an incredibly strong driver of change to increase sales. Jody has been training this concept of pain for over 22 years in over 32 countries. In this episode, Jodi discusses how to use the power of pain to more effectively sell your ideas, products and services. Go to geniusnetwork.com123 to access the show notes for this episode along with an exercise to help you take action on what Jody discusses.

Growing pains Pain in the neck. Feeling no pain Pain in the ass. Yes, we often use the word pain for impact. Yet one of the most powerful ways you can use pain is not as an expression, but in your selling. No matter what what you say your job title is, everyone in this room sells. If you don't sell actual products or services, you do sell yourself and you sell your ideas. But do you sell using pain? You will be after this 10 minute talk. Pain is the strongest driver of change and yet most ordinary salespeople keep talking about features and benefits in selling the gain when they should be selling the pain. For the last 22 years, Jody Williamson has been training this concept about pain as a licensee with Sandler training. There are 276 Sandler offices in 32 countries and Jody's company consistently ranks in the top five every year and his sales manager's program is the number one ranked Sandler management program in the world. Jody develops new Sandler content and is the creator of the popular Sandler programs like the Income Doubler, the constant sales improvement process and the dangers of Success. He's also a regular speaker at their national conferences and at the Sandler Global Client Summit. He's a master sales trainer and has written a best selling book, the Contrarian Salesperson. Plus he's won the David H. Sandler Award, which many people consider the highest award in sales training. Jody's objective is to have you see how powerful pain can be in the selling of your products, your services and your ideas. Jody's title is Pain is Good. Please help me welcome Jody Williamson.

Okay, so a lot of talk so far today about pain and selling, so hopefully this ties together. I want to specifically talk about pain in the sales process and I really want you to know a little bit more about why pain is important, but also I want you to have a couple strategies to apply the concept and also just let you feel comfortable using pain because not everyone's Comfortable with just the use of it in sales. So if you google pain, there's a lot of definitions that come up, but this definition I want to use for today is pain is the gap between where somebody is and where they want to be. Okay, so that's the working definition we'll use for today. And I want you to think of the emotional motivator. So what drives this whole thing is human emotion. We talked yesterday with Ben Hardy about how emotional words create action. And it's no different in the sales process. Pain creates action. So if you look at the emotional motivators and if you ever took a Psych 101 class, you probably learned this hierarchy, right? That pain at the top of the chart is the strongest of all motivators, followed by fear. So pain in the present, people do anything to avoid. Fear of pain in the future is second. Pleasure or gain is third. Not as strong, it will still move people. Nothing close to what fear and pain will. And then curiosity is kind of at the bottom of the motivators. In 30 plus years of coaching salespeople and selling, I find that salespeople spend way too much time in curiosity mode, dealing with prospects who are curious yet because they're interested, they assume they're better qualified than they are. And then they have all these problems like spending a lot of time, spending a lot of energy, multiple meetings. At the end of the whole process, when you don't have someone motivated and are in curiosity mode, you usually get some form of tio. Who knows what tio is? Think it over. Right, Think it over. And the only one thinking it over, by the way, is the salesperson prospect. Already thought it over. They just didn't want to say no yet and hurt your feelings. So if we move up the chart and we say okay, we have pleasure and gain, will people buy for pleasure? Yes, they will. But I haven't seen a situation yet when I'm coaching people where by adding the element of pain, they can't be even more effective in their selling. So a couple examples of this, Chicago teachers, one of the areas, they wanted to raise the kids test score. So they wanted to raise them from basically one to another level called B and A. The first group of teachers, they told them this. They said if you hit the goals, you're going to get a bonus. The second group, they told them this, we'll give you the bonus now, but if you don't hit the goal, you got to pay it back. Which was more successful, the loss, the pain, the gas company example, Some of You heard the energy audit where they did energy audits to make recommendations to homeowners. They came in and they had two different ways they delivered the results. One is they said if you make the changes, you could save $50 more a month in your energy. The second group was told if you don't make the changes, it cost you 50 more dollars a month in your energy bill, which was more successful. Cost loss, pain even in diet and exercise. I see this. We all know the benefits of diet and exercise and changing it. We talk about it a lot here, right? We've got looking better, feeling better, living longer. We all know that. But who do you know, maybe personally, who. It took an event to transform their health. It was the pain that got them to change. And it wasn't until that happened that they did things like a bad test result, heart attack, unflattering photos. I find weddings that are coming up tend to be the painful event that people are worried about. So I want to apply it to a couple of people I've gotten to know in the room over the last couple years who I work with. So Jim do. And I want to do this to show the difference between gain and pain. So Jim has some cool titles. He's a cfp, an mba, he's a chfc, he's a cpwa, and he's a cdfa. I got them all. And that adds up to Jim being a bfd, right? Is he a big friggin deal? She's not answering. You notice that, right? So if you look at Jim, I work with a lot of wealth advisors and here's the typical gains that wealth advisors will sell. They'll create a comprehensive plan. They'll develop an ad asset protection strategy. They'll strategize retirement. These are all things that Jim does very well, but they're gains and they're not as motivating. Flipping it to pains. It's things like he finds people who are concerned that a crazy lawsuit is going to wipe out their net worth or they're worried they'll outlive their money and be dependent on their children or they're upset they're paying too much more than their peers in taxes. Those are pains. Now we heard from Joel already. So Joel is the ultimate speaking system. Or maybe there's other people that have this now. But Joel will do all kinds of great things. He's the best in the world, right? He'll help you be a better speaker, which is a gain. He's got 55 plus tools. He will make your content Crystal clear and compelling. They're all good. But pains would be things like working with people who are worried that they're going to bomb a speech. They're concerned that the career growth is being limited by their skills. They're frustrated that when they do speak they're going to come across as unprofessional. Those are pains. Those are more motivating. If you even look at mine, we have Sandler and I could say things like we have a proven selling system 50 years. We have ongoing training programs, we help see salespeople improve. I could say all those things, but I know through 22 years of doing this, the motivators are the pains. When people are concerned they're not bringing enough new accounts in, or they're frustrated the closing ratio is low, or they're worried they're cutting price and not selling value. Those are the emotional drivers that I want you to start considering using in the way you're positioning yourself in selling. So let me give you three actions. Number one, adopting a discovery based mindset. Traditional selling is one of convincing and I want you to consider discovery instead. See, if you try to convince someone of something, what's their natural psychological reaction? If you try to convince someone something, push back defense wall, which is not good for a sales conversation, especially when you're talking about their pains, they will definitely go into denial mode. So I want you to consider having a mindset that says how can I get them to discover their pains through the stories and the questions and the way I'm interacting. There's a couple tools that I'll give you also as actions today to do that. One is developing a 30 second commercial, but a bit elevator pitch some people call it. But different than what you might have learned because you probably learned a feature benefit version of the 30 second commercial. And I want you to consider a pain centered 30 second commercial because the features and benefits Features and benefits is convincing in nature and tends to what I call a lean back response you get from prospects. I want you to have people leaning forward and engaged and interested and you do that by covering pains that they're experiencing that get them to lean forward. Developing pain based discovery questions is really the third action I'd recommend you take. And being able to construct the kinds of questions that walk someone through being kind of in curiosity mode down to something more actionable and pain mode where they're motivated. So this pain funnel is a way to ask questions that take people from a broad issue down to something that exposes their consequences around financial impact and time impact and the way that affects them personally. That's the drivers that get people to take action. But the most important reason to focus on pain, I think, is if you're in front of somebody. Everyone in this room has magic dust. Everyone in this room is a superhero in something they do. And many of you can save people's lives and transform their lives. I know that because these conversations I hear, I know that's this room. But if you're in a conversation with someone and you know you can help them and you don't walk them through pain discovery and they stay curious or they stay in gain mode and now they give you a tio, you have not done them a favor. That's unethical, selling, not taking someone to a place of making a decision. And if you get to the end of the step and they don't have pain, you should walk away. Life's too short to sell people something that they don't need. But if you truly have someone in front of you who has a need and you know in your heart of hearts you can help them, you owe it to them to discover their pain. Thank you.

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