Perfect Pitch: Seeking commitment

The single need shared by all clients and customers is to feel relief from some form of pain. Truly, relief from pain – which may be mild or severe – is what every buyer wants. Eliminating the negative experience of pain is a much stronger incentive to action than upside opportunities. It’s just human nature.  

But the pain of waiting a few minutes for your computer to boot up is very different from the pain of trying to get health insurance coverage for a chronic illness. While relief from pain is always a client's dominant buying motive, the nature and intensity of that pain covers a wide range of experiences. But regardless of the specific nature of your client's pain, your ongoing task is to highlight the relief you can provide. Make sure this primary benefit is understood. Be absolutely certain that the solution you’re selling is clear.  

You can do this using this two step process. First, clarify the discomfort that your client is now experiencing. Then make it equally clear that you have a solution to that specific discomfort.  

Both of these steps are very important. But what makes them really effective are the bridging devices that need to be placed between the steps. We can refer to those bridges as commitments. 

A commitment is any agreement on the part of the client to take another step forward toward finalizing a business relationship. In other words, a commitment moves us nearer to the close, but it is not the close itself. Very often a commitment is simply a very basic statement like, "Let's keep talking."

Trying to move into the close too soon -- without ever asking for the commitments that make the close feasible -- is a very common mistake. Again, you must first remind the client of the difficulty that he or she currently has to live with. Then you must make it clear that you have a product or service to change that situation for the better.  

Once you have identified and clarified for the client that he or she is enduring a certain amount of pain, you then request agreement about that fact. You ask the buyer to agree with you that there is indeed a problem. That agreement is a commitment, albeit a limited one. All you have to do is invite the client to acknowledge that there is indeed a problem. Once you’ve done that, you’ve gotten a commitment that authorizes you to keep talking. Sometimes (or often) that's enough for one day!