BRX Pro Tip: Are You Selling Pain Killers or Vitamins
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tups. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, the answers are always in the questions. And among some really important questions for us to ask ourselves, it’s around what we’re selling. Are we selling painkillers or are we selling vitamins?
Lee Kantor: [00:00:19] Yeah, this is something that I heard from, I think, it was David Cummings or somebody one day, Atlanta Tech folks, when they were talking about kind of customer discovery. They said, “Are you selling painkillers or are you selling vitamins?” Painkillers make pain go away today. Vitamins are preventative and theoretically make you feel better over time. And it’s always better to sell painkillers. So, identify what the pain is. And then, have a solution that you get rid of that pain for your client.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] So, keep that in mind when you’re framing your offer, when you’re trying to see if it’s a fit to try to really understand and empathize with your client of what is the true pain. And is it true that if you can make it go away, then they’ll buy your stuff? So, think in terms of painkillers always to make a pain go away because people will take action to get rid of that pain.
Stone Payton: [00:01:08] Well, I think that’s marvelous counsel. But I want to play that out a little bit because I’m thinking maybe the answer ought to be yes or maybe the answer ought to be sell them painkillers. But in delivering the service, try to deliver something that is more like a vitamin and serves them over the long haul. I wonder if that doesn’t really set the foundation for future relationship, and referrals, and that kind of thing. So, yeah. Help me think this through a minute. You’re advocating upfront use, you sell the painkiller, but you would try to provide vitamins as well somewhere in the process, yeah?
Lee Kantor: [00:01:46] Well, I think that people are going to take faster action to get rid of a pain than they are about kind of overall health. Just look at people’s behavior. If you have a headache, you go and buy Tylenol. How often are you going, “Well, I should probably eat right”?
Stone Payton: [00:02:04] Yeah.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:04] You’re not going to, you know, pick the healthy option today. You know, doing that preventative stuff sounds good and people will nod their head and say, “Yeah, I should be doing more of that.” But when there’s an actual pain that you want to get rid of, you’re going to take action today. All this other stuff is nice to have and we aspire to that, but it’s a harder sell to sell that as your offering. You have to kind of, at first, sell them some sort of a painkiller. And if it does all this other stuff, that’s great. But the way to make that first sale, I think, is always going to be around solving a pain rather than preventing some long-term problem down the road.
