Symptoms Sell

If you are a solution type of person like me, then the concept
that symptoms sell may not be intuitive at first. "What do you
mean symptoms sell? I'm hired to offer a solution!" Yes, that's
true. But selling symptoms and offering a solution are not
mutually exclusive. The trick is in your timing. You see, until
your almost-client feels you understand their problem, they are
not going to listen to a solution you offer.

The funny thing is, when you spend time asking questions to
uncover their problem and dig deeply to find out what they've
already tried to solve it, it naturally prevents you from
jumping in too soon with a solution. This means you are
following my golden rule: It's Not About You, It's About Them.

Asking about symptoms takes the pressure off of you to sell.
You are just engaging your almost-client in an in-depth
conversation with one purpose in mind - to find out how bad
the problem is, and what happens if they don't fix it.

You don't have to spend hours engaged in this type of a
conversation, even as few as 5 minutes can reap huge rewards.
Precision questions make this easy. Now I realize that if you
are a dyed-in-the-wool solution person this take a bit of
awareness and practice.

Here are 2 reasons why adopting this practice is worth it:
#1 You can help more people if they feel you understand their
situation. And helping people is probably why you do what you
do, isn't it?

#2 The greater the problem is, the less important money will be
to your almost-client. Think about this for a moment - the more
important the problem is, the easier it is for an almost-client
to find the money to hire you. This means you have
little-to-no-quibbling about your fee.

So why not prepare 2-3 precision language questions this week
that will help you unearth the symptoms your almost-client may
be experiencing? Get comfortable hearing about their problems
and don't be satisfied until you've discovered what the
consequences are in not resolving them. Dig deeply and you will
find incredible treasures in your conversations!

Once you've dug deeply to uncover the symptoms and what happens
if they don't fix them, it's finally time to transition your
conversation to the solution you have to offer. With this caveat
- do NOT, under any circumstances, spend more than 1 minute
going into detail about how to work with you.

The temptation to go into more detail will be strong. Resist.
Here's a rule of thumb to keep in mind. Follow it and you will
be following my golden rule: It's Not About You, It's About
Them. The rule of thumb is: You are either asking a question or
summarizing what they've said.

So to transition your conversation to a solution, you can say
something like this (I've used my own business as an example,
but this will work equally well for yours):

"So you're looking for a way to stop spending so much time on
your marketing and instead get better results with the time you
do have to spend, is that right?"

Now comes the transition...

"If I could show you a way to accomplish that, would you be
interested in hearing about it?"

Simple, elegant, and completely permission-based. How often do
you think you will hear "Yes!"? Probably 99.9% of the time!

So what comes next? Your 30-45 second description of how you
can help them, carefully crafted to amplify the results they
get and minimize the mechanics of how you work.

If you say these examples out loud, you'll hear how easy this
template is to follow. It's a simple structure for focusing on
symptoms that keeps the conversation all about them, and makes
it easy for you to understand your almost-client's situation
in greater depth than you ever have before.

Now it's your turn!