The primary purpose of Pain Chains™ is to demonstrate the interdependence within an organization. This dynamic, working tool can be flexibly used in many places throughout the sales cycle to help you increase the size of your opportunities, move opportunities through your pipeline faster and position yourself as a business consultant.

Have you ever considered using Pain Chains™ to:

• Build your situational knowledge?
• Help you qualify an opportunity?
• Determine where you should initiate contact within an organization?
• Train new sales reps?
• Build Pain Sheets™?
• Validate information gathered during conversations with the buyer and confirm your understanding?
• Help the sponsor realize the importance of giving you access to power?
• Help you close the opportunity?
• Demonstrate the value you brought to the buyer's organization during a year-end review?
• Communicate from a business perspective at sales seminars and trade shows?

Build Your Situational Knowledge

When strategizing about where to initiate contact first within a given organization, begin building preliminary Pain Chains™ based on knowledge gleaned through pre-call planning. This information could come from a variety of sources (annual reports, industry periodicals, newspapers, television interviews with key executives, etc.). You may also want to look at Pain Chains™ you built for other companies in the same industry to further stimulate your thoughts. Use these sources as the pieces of information to help you build the Pain Chain™ . Building Pain Chains™ can help you identify where your information gaps exist within a given opportunity as additional people are added to Pain Chains™ . This is the first step in determining what the true picture is within the organization.

Help You Qualify an Opportunity

Just as the old mantra says, "No Pain, No Change". The cost of the pain must be greater than the cost of change. Is there enough pain to justify a change? Identifying additional people impacted adds to the cost of the pain. The more people impacted, the greater the chance that the pain is large. Pain Chains™ that are made up of many people can sometimes reflect a larger revenue opportunity than one with less people which makes Pain Chains™ a helpful tool to consider during the qualification process.

Determine Where You Should Initiate Contact within the Organization

Determining where to initiate the sell can make the difference when it comes to the length and expense of the sales cycle. First, identify which individuals on the Pain Chains™ you think would be at power. Then, consider which of those individuals has the greatest compelling reason to act and how much of their pain your capabilites are able to address. Based on this assessment, you should be able to make a good judgment on where to initiate the sell.

Train New Sales Reps

Pain Chains™ can be especially helpful in demonstrating to new sellers which scenarios have been most successful for your successful sellers to demonstrate. The differentiators that a seller's capabilities can offer are going to map better to some pains than others. Therefore, Pain Chains™ can serve as a map to show the new seller what pains and individuals can be (and have been - using Pain Chains™ built for real opportunities) targeted to achieve the best results.

Build Pain Sheets™

The pain, reasons and impacts portions of Pain Sheets™ should map to Pain Chains™ . Many sellers develop a Pain Sheet™ for that individual. Through the course of developing Pain Sheets™ , oftentimes, the person building the Pain Sheet™ thinks of additional possible reasons that their differentiating capabilities could address and revises the Pain Chains™ as a result. Pain Sheets™ and Pain Chains™ are very dynamic documents during pre-call planning.

Validate Information Gathered during Conversations with the Buyer and Confirm your Understanding

Often, you will discover additional reasons and more people impacted during the initial call that you had not previously thought of during pre-call planning. The preliminary Pain Chains™ built during pre-call planning will most likely change as you learn what is really going on in this particular company.

After the call, Pain Chains™ (revised based on information gleaned during the conversation with the prospect), can be shared with the customer to validate the seller's understanding of the issues discussed. We suggest that the seller refer to Pain Chains™ as an "Organizational Impact Chart" as opposed to Pain Chains™ when speaking with the prospect about the tool. For purposes of simplicity, in this document, the tool will consistently be referred to as Pain Chains™. The Pain Chains™ will likely change again with additional persons interviewed as you verify information and gather new information. Sharing Pain Chains™ with the prospect demonstrates to them that you were listening. Any changes made by the prospect at that point will only increase their level of support.

Help the Sponsor realize the Importance of Giving you Access to Power

Often, sellers find sponsors who do not want to give them access to other people in account. Oftentimes it is because a sponsor is afraid you will not make a good impression and it will be a reflection on them or that they will somehow lose control. Pain Chains™ can be instrumental in putting the sponsor at ease by showing them that you are prepared, you understand the issues and including them in your vision so that they are comfortable that your message is in line with their views.

Help you Close the Opportunity

After speaking with everyone on Pain Chains™ , you have a validated Pain Chain that can be used to help mitigate risk and close the opportunity. The Pain Chains™ serve as an excellent summary of all of the research the buyer and you have done to determine the impacts of a particular problem on various parts of an organization, reminding the buyer of all of the research and preparation that went into making this informed decision. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the problem helps the buyer see that there can actually be more risks associated with not moving forward to address the issues. Pains that impact many people can be much more expensive and disastrous when considering all of the costs associated with each person who is indirectly affected by the company not having the capabilities you can provide. The Pain Chain can be included in the proposal or in a closing discussion with a buying committee to succinctly serve as a reminder of what has brought you to the closing meeting reminding the buyer of the compelling reason(s) to act.

Demonstrate the Value you brought to the Buyer's Organization during a Year-End Review

Many companies initiate year-end reviews with their customers (some customers require them). Pain Chains™ can be an excellent vehicle for demonstrating the value that you brought to an organization over the past year through various projects. You could use each of the Pain Chains™ that were developed for each opportunity with an extra layer of information beside each pain to demonstrate the cost savings, revenue generation or any other benefit that was ultimately derived through having those capabilities. Of course, this would require that you measure the benefits derived throughout the year with the customer - another important Solution Selling^® principle.

When returning to measure the benefits, you may find that additional benefits were derived that were not included in the Pain Chains™ . This would allow the seller to add to the existing Pain Chains™ as well as to the seller's situational knowledge when building future Pain Chains.

Using Pain Chains™ during year-end reviews starts with Pain Chains™ that were agreed upon with the customer at closing to demonstrate the impact of what they were able to accomplish with our capabilities….essentially turning Pain Chains™ into Gain Chains!

Communicate from a Business Perspective at Sales Seminars and Trade Shows

Being an excellent visual for demonstrating complex problems, you could display three different Pain Chains™ to a group of people showing real scenarios where you (or your company) have helped other companies solve through providing the companies with the capabilities they needed. You may even want to consider including the Pain Chains™ in the invitation to the event. Using the Pain Chains™ during sales seminars and trade shows positions the seller as a business consultant to attract business people.

Pain Chains™ embody the fundamental principles that Solution Selling^® asserts. It is a very consultative tool which supports the buyer's perception of you as someone who adds value and helps them look at their situation from a business perspective. Pain Chains™ lead the seller and the buyer to think about the issues in a much broader sense so the right decision can be made for the organization as a whole. Let Pain Chains™ be your map to the pain, power and value that exists within the account.

The seller is encouraged to make Pain Chains™ and any other tool within the Solution Selling^® process their own by looking for additional creative ways to utilize the consultative tools to help bring the seller in closer alignment with the buyer and move the sales process forward.

If you use Pain Chains™ within the Solution Selling^® process in a creative way, not mentioned in class, please contact us at info@spisales.com. Your name will be entered into a monthly drawing for a complete set of the Sales Performance Tools Series Books.