Step Three of I promote. Once you've established rapport with the audience, and you've identified with their problems, now, I need to increase the need for them to solve that problems. It's a real rookie error in sales and persuasion to want now to rush off to the solution. When you've heard people's problems, it's very tempting to try to then match that with aspects of what you have to offer. And that's okay. But it's not as effective as spending some time with people on why they need to solve the problem that they've already got.

This is probably the hardest skill in sales, and also the most important so let's break this down into two parts. First of all, you need to establish the pain Now that people are suffering from their current problems, have a think for a moment about your own life and think about a problem that you have currently but you're not solving. For example, you might have a really cluttered garriage that you're just not getting around to tidying. Got one in mind. Now ask yourself, why am I not solving it? The answer to this gives you the key to why people often put up with a lot of problems, but never move forward to solving them.

In other words, they don't end up buying or solving their problem in another way. You might think about your marriage, I just can't be bothered or it's not worth it, or it's too much hassle. underneath all of these answers are four categories of resistance. And those are time, money, emotion, and risk. four categories that will become your best friends when you're trying to persuade people to change So how can you categorize the pain that people are feeling in association with that problem? Let's take our bicycle example again.

So I'm sat in the audience and I want to buy a luxury bicycle. But I don't, because if you remember, I'm worried about it being stolen in London. So what's the pain associated with that? Well, the pain for me is that I don't have a bicycle. So I don't have anything to cycle on, which means I can't get to work on time, or I'm not getting as much exercise and therefore I feel unhealthy. I might have other worries associated with risk.

So I might be a bit worried about cycling, on the other hand, because it's dangerous. So it's a good idea here to just write a mind map or a list of all of the things that people are worrying about. And then, while they're having that problem, what kind of pain is that currently causing in their lives and you want to Call out all of those things to the audience Say that again. They go, Oh, yeah, that is what I'm thinking. There is a saying in sales, no pain, no purchase, unless you press into the pain enough here, they're not going to think that the solution is worth it in a minute when you go on to reveal it. And also, when you reveal how expensive it is, I had a bad back and some injury that actually went up the front of my body at one point and I went to a chiropractor, and he pressed his thumb into the pain.

And I said out, don't do that. And he said, Do you want me to solve it or not? And I said, Sure, yeah, I do want you to solve it. And so he pressed harder, and sure enough, he got rid of the pain. So this is where we move on to part two of this step, which is what is the payoff going to be the people what's the benefit of removing That current pain, you still haven't revealed the solution, you know that you might have a wonderful product coming up on the next slide, but you haven't wheeled it out yet. However, you want to start talking about what's on the other end of the rainbow.

If people were to take this worry away, if, for example, with our bicycle, I could assure you that it will not get stolen. Because you know, further down the line, you've got storage solutions as well on offer. would that mean that you would buy it? Well, my answer the audience then would be yes, I totally would. If I could buy it and store it and it wouldn't get stolen. I'd love to have it.

Tell me how I can get one. You want to move people into a state here and tell me how I can get one before you reveal the solution. If you start too early with the solution, their resistance goes up. We have a kind of sales radar and we think no Hang on a minute. I'm not persuaded that I even need this thing, and therefore I don't know why you're telling me about it. So getting them to the point of biting your hand off is the purpose of this step.

So think about pain and payoff here. And time, money, emotion risk, speak into those four categories. Work hard here in this step, you should be breaking a sweat. And then when it comes to revealing your solution in a moment, you're going to find it a lot easier to do.