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Traditionally, salespeople rely on their product’s or service’s features and benefits to do most of the selling. Even if the salesperson offers lots of free consulting and invests lots of time, effort, and energy in the relationship, they usually get a noncommittal response like, “We’ll think it over” or “We’ll let you know”?

Sales professionals may be used to thinking about “pain” as a physical sensation. However, sales pros must expand their understanding of the term to align with that of Sandler Training’s founder, David Sandler.

Are you a salesperson who has been hearing too many of these statements: “We’ll think it over,” “Get back to me,” and “We’ll let you know”? If so, you’re in good company. I want to help you to fix that problem.

David Sandler’s search for knowledge about why and how people buy coincided with the Transactional Analysis (TA) movement in psychology. TA theory defines three ego states that influence our behavior—the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. Think of these ego states as internal tape recorders where childhood impressions—teachings and associated feelings—are stored.

Some time ago I stood in the security line at Logan. I was on my way to Orlando to speak at the National Conference of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Using "the three foot rule", which says "whenever you are within three feet of someone ask them what they do as they may be a prospect", I struck up a conversation with the gentleman behind me. He turned out to be the Head of the Central and Eastern European Divisions of L. Hoffman LaRoche.

These days, more than ever, salespeople are challenged by "think it overs", "we'll let you knows", "we'll be sending you the P.O. soon", "the order is on its way", broken promises and order cancellations. Prospects and Customers are unsure and scared as job security erodes and 401K's would well be described as " 40.1K's", as they are worth about 40.1 percent of what they were.

You don’t tightly target your prospects. When business is slow, the temptation to tell your story to whomever will listen is great. After all, talking to someone-anyone-is more productive than sitting at your desk waiting for a potential customer to call. Right?..

I have met many excellent sales people that were chief executives. They could prospect, qualify, close and negotiate. Their closing ratios surpassed their best sales people. Yet, they couldn't train their people to sell. Even though they tried, by coaching, running sales meetings, showing and telling, they weren't effective at training sales people. In fact, in some cases it made their sales people worse as they tried to emulate the Boss.

During sales training sessions, there are a handful of questions that come up frequently. They are generally in the form of “How can I (get/convince/persuade) prospects to (do something)?” Here are examples from a recent workshop.

It’s been over thirty years since David Sandler introduced the concept of “pain” as the core element of a selling methodology—the Sandler Selling System®. Pain represented the prospect’s collective reasons to buy a product or service. Sandler chose the term not only for its connotation physical discomfort, emotional distress, or something troublesome—but also for its relationship to one’s motivation to take action. Psychologists note that people take action to either seek pleasure or avoid pain. Of the two, they suggest that avoiding pain is the bigger motivator.