Tell Me Where It Hurts

Tell Me Where It Hurts

Last night my wife drug took me to a seminar at a local doctor’s office for a new 21st Century procedure that promised to make me more youthful, age more slowly, and live longer.

As you might imagine, the room was filled to the gills with folks that wanted to explore the same promises.

The doctor gave his presentation, and then it was time for the question and answer session.

Heaven help me.

The Q&A session quickly moved from the topic he was discussing to an open forum for any remotely related topic that the audience could pose to an MD who was answering questions for free!

And yet the doctor did his job.

He found out where his audience hurt and he was there with the proposed solutions.

Your clients are no different – they hurt too.

We hope it’s not a medical hurt, but they have problems that you need to solve.

Think about questions that get to the heart of the hurt such as:

  • As you think back on the past 12 months, in what areas did you need your business to improve?
  • In what ways aren’t your portfolios behaving as you had expected?
  • Compared to last year, are you net positive or net negative clients?
  • How are you (your business, your portfolio) positioned for a period of potentially extended slow economic growth?
  • What events do you have planned to reach your existing book of business?
  • If you could hire a consultant to help you with one dimension of your business, in what area would that consultant specialize?
  • What are your plans for acquiring new clients?
  • What are your thoughts about integrating social media into your business?

Once you have the answers to even a couple of these questions, you can begin to formulate the right prescriptions that your clients or prospects can closely relate to.

As much as we know that leading the discussion with product is simply a bad idea on a dead end road, too many folks still do it.

How about if you find out where it hurts?