On Dissatisfaction

People don’t change unless and until they are dissatisfied. Without dissatisfaction, there’s nothing to compel your prospective client to do something. There’s no reason for them to take action.

Your job in sales is to discover dissatisfaction or create it.

Find Dissatisfaction

If your prospective client is dissatisfied, the source of that dissatisfaction is the focus of your discovery work. What’s causing them pain? What needs to change? What’s broken? Your dream client’s dissatisfaction is where you’ll find the ability to develop a compelling solution.

If your dream client isn’t motivated to take action, it’s because they aren’t yet dissatisfied enough to do so.

Create Dissatisfaction

Much of the time you find that your dream clients aren’t dissatisfied. When this is true, you have to help them become dissatisfied.

Many of your dream clients should be dissatisfied. They just don’t know it yet. You can help them become dissatisfied, or your competitors will. Your dream clients should be producing better results. There is a gap between the results they are producing now and some better future results they’re capable of producing. And better future results are always possible—if you’re resourceful enough to figure out how.

Stay with me here; I know this gets tough. What you sell is the ability to help your dream client close the gap and produce better results. But first you have to help your dream client understand that they should be dissatisfied, that there is a gap.

If you want your clients to be compelled to buy, then you have to either discover the source of their dissatisfaction or you have to create that dissatisfaction. Then you have to show them how to close the gap around that dissatisfaction.

You either find dissatisfaction or you create it. All opportunities are born in dissatisfaction.