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The Crucial Slide for Sales Presentation: Customer Pain

This presentation tip is in the category:  The Perfect Sales Presentation Series

I had the opportunity to attend Dr. Saimond Yip’s entrepreneurship class in The University of Hong Kong.  Our first class activity was a role play of pitching an investor.  Po Chung, Founder of DHL International, was helping out in the role play acting as a potential investor.  Each student had approximately two minutes to pitch Po.  The result was that no one in the class could succeed in the pitching exercise.

The conclusion Dr. Saimond Yip would like to draw from the exercise was that sales skill is the number one skill entrepreneurs need to master.  Entrepreneurs need to pitch customers, investors, partnering companies and suppliers everyday.  It is unlikely for entrepreneurs to succeed if they are missing this core skill.

In the following class, Dr. Saimond Yip start sharing with us the core component of a sales presentation: understanding customer pain and tangible benefits

Why should your customer buy from you? As a sales professional, we should be able to accurately spot the stuffs that are bothering our customers.  What are our customers’ problems? What could be done to make our customer’s life easier? It is always the best if we could help our customers solve problems related to money and time because these benefits are tangible and quantifiable.

To help our customers understand their problems, one thing that could be done is to have a slide that calculates how much customers are currently spending and how much time they got tied up with the work.  And then, present your solutions and compare the cost or time saving.

On the other hand, customers’ problems do not 100% relate to quantifiable elements.  Some of the problems could be psychological.  Many sales professional like to sell their products on solving customer fears:

- Fear of falling behind in an industry.
- Fear of losing a job.
- Fear of potential incidents that could possibility harm ones’ financial health.
- Fear of not belong to a peer group.

For example, buying an insurance help solve people’s financial risk during accidents.  Buying a sport car could help university students satisfy their belonging needs. 

Marketers like to exaggerate these fear factors to threaten customers until they make a buying decision.  To make a convincing case, include industry statistics and case studies in your presentation.

Finally, I would like to clarify that when we are selling our customers, we should classify customer pain and benefits in two levels:

1. Purchaser level
2. Company level

For example, helping a company save more money or make more money doesn’t necessary help the purchasing manager directly.  We should also try to figure out how our products could benefit the purchasing manager as well (e.g. move up the corporate ladder or eliminate risk of losing a job).

As soon as you could fully understand your customers’ pain, you will be able to offer something useful to your customers.  At the end of the day, your product should actually be able to help your customers.  Remember, your customer will not continue using your service for long run simply because of doing you a favour.  They need to receive enough benefits in order to justify their budget and continuous buying decisions.