Pain, Power, Vision: The 3 critical elements in any sale

I have to start this by giving a big shout out to Terry Turner, who was a huge influence early in my sales career. He highlighted these 3 principles years ago and they still ring true today. In 30 years of sales, I have rarely closed a deal without a thorough understanding all three of these elements. I have also used them to develop and refine my overall account strategy program.

Introduction: Pain, Power, and Vision. It sounds so simple. But it is actually quite complicated, with each element having multiple dimensions and complexities. Finding out the answers and making sure everyone agrees with these characteristics is what enterprise selling is all about and what separates the best reps from everyone else. I will provide high level thoughts on each in this post, and then dive in deeper into each element in the next 3 blog posts. A January Pain, Power, Vision blog series, if you will.

It is also important to point out that this is not a sales methodology, or a process. These are indisputable elements that are present in any sale, of any kind. Learn them and use them, or don't, but trust me, they are there. Think of any purchase you have made recently. There was some problem you were trying to solve, you alone had the power to make the purchase (although major purchases typically involves others), and you compared alternatives until you found the one that best matched your vision. You did not always choose the best product, or the cheapest. You chose the one that best fit your vision for what your life is like with that purchase.

Pain

The whole idea of pain is very misunderstood. Truly understanding the pain, in all the different dimensions, that exists in a large company is mind boggling. For example, when I ask reps to describe the pain they have uncovered from their prospect, they say things like "Oh, they are on spreadsheets and the work is very hard and time consuming". Or, they don't have the data to make good decisions, so they just do what they did last year, with a minor adjustment. These issues are real pain points, but they are operational and tactical pain. Users and managers feel this pain, but execs and people that can prioritize the project do not feel it. When I ask reps about the impact of these operational problems, the true business problems, I usually get the "the prospect does not even know" answer. Reps that can separate and link operational problems to impactful business problems have a far greater chance of success.

The truth is that there are multiple dimensions of pain. There is the obvious operational and then business pain, but there is also strategic, financial, political, and personal pain. Most deals will not close without a high degree of personal and political pain. I will dive into these dimensions in the next post, but for now, I do want to the importance of pain and how it is different than offering value.

The Pain of doing nothing MUST exceed the pain of changing. Across the board, we tend to underestimate how much pain must be present and active in order to sell a deal. Think of how hard it is to invoke change in your own life, much less a multi-billion corporation. It has always been hard, but in these days, executives seem less willing to stick there neck out, sign up for a solid ROI, or champion change in general. Status Quo is so powerful and is clearly the number 1 competitor for any software company. Sadly, most companies will be fine without your solution. Ever ask the question "what bad happens if you don't implement this project"? I typically get confusion and a non answer from the prospect.

We also tend to underestimate the pain of changing. Think about what it takes to implement a major project. Someone has to put their name on the line, sign up for value, or ROI, gather the required resources, champion the project, allocate the necessary time, etc, etc, etc. The pain of change is very large, and risky, and we have to put ourselves in the prospect's shoes to make sure we are uncovering and even creating enough business and personal pain to overcome doing nothing.

Pain is much different than Value. I often hear investors and founders tell me: John, the ROI is huge, why don't they just buy it? Don't get me wrong, I love a good value story as much as anyone, but unfortunately, in corporate America, very, very few people are incented to maximize value. Most are incented to hit their budget and stay out of the limelight. Seems like the mistakes are punished, while the heroics are just not worth it. Why go out on a limb, put yourself out there, if there is not a very important problem to be solved, and a problem that is impacting you personally and politically.

Personally, I love golf and used to be pretty good at it. I would love to add 20 yards to my drive, until I find out I have to workout 5 days a week, take lessons, and actually practice hitting balls 3-4 times a week. I would love 20 extra yards, but the pain of change is too great. Selling me on the value is not enough. Then you might point out that I should work out so I don't get hurt in the future. Fair enough, but future pain that may or may not happen will not move the needle either. Something else will always get in the way and be more important. But if I hurt my back, then I am in enough active pain to warrant a change in behavior, and then I have the added benefit of longer drives.

All this applies in the corporate world. Value alone is not enough. One of the solutions with the highest ROI I have ever seen was price optimization. Not coincidentally, it was also one of the hardest sells. It was like we were selling elective surgery, or vitamins. Many times, I heard from my prospects that other broken processes were more important, even if much less valuable. Companies would tell me, "We are going to implement an ERP system and spend $200m rather than increasing sales by $100m with better pricing". Sounds crazy, but it happened. It is still happening. Not fulfilling an order was much more visible than the impact of a bad price. No one knew the price was bad, so the pain was not evident. We had to work hard to understand the problems and pain points of senior executives and then link better pricing as a way to solve those pain points.

The big AhAh I had early in my career was that people did not buy because of the ROI, they bought to solve a big problem that impacted them personally and politically, and then they justify their decision based on the ROI. We all need to work hard to link our value to active business problems felt by very senior executives.

No Pain, no Deal.

Power

Who really has the power, anyway? How can you tell? It is not just the title, and you can't just go by the organization chart. And to make matters worse, the more power people have, the quieter they are and the less likely they will spend time with you. Ugh.

Your sales effort is only as good as the political power of your sponsor. I always tell the story that if you were trying to sell my 16 year old son a car, you would think you were the best salesmen in the history of the world. He would love all the features you were selling, he would describe his pain in great detail, and might even convince you he can pay for it. The only problem? I have the power, and my pain is seeing my son behind the wheel of a car. It is not going to happen, at least for a few more years, and with a cheap junker car at that. I had the power, and the checkbook, to makes things happen, but no pain. I actually had negative pain!

We tend to underestimate how high and how powerful the sponsor needs to be in order to get a deal done. These days, the sponsor typically has to have a C in the title, or be very connected and aligned with that C level person.  It takes a great deal of political power to get deals done these days. It always has, but it feels even harder these days. Even the best executive sponsors may not have enough power to move forward, since everything seems to have to go through the CFO and that mysterious steering committee in the sky. How many deals have you had where you get all the way to final approval, only to have another executive grab the remaining budget, or the CIO explain that there are simply no resources for this project? The competition for the budget is fierce and resources are more limited than ever before.

Just like the No Pain, No Deal mantra, we also have the No Power, No Deal. In my experience, it is binary. When we get to the right person with the right message and vision, we get a deal. When we don't, we are in for a long, drawn out cycle and most times, we won't get the deal. I have seen a lot of reps do a great job of "winning the deal", that is, convincing them your solution is the best, but they forget to "create the deal", by making sure they have continued support from power.

The path to power is the most important role of the sales rep. While it is always preferred to start at the top, we rarely get that opportunity. That means we have to navigate our way to power. What are all the buyer roles, who has influence and credibility? What even determines power and influence? We have to figure out all of these subtle clues and dynamics to effectively figure out who has power and how to get to that person(s). We have to figure out who can help us get the right people involved, who is just blocking us, and who is just wasting our time. The rep has to figure out all the various roles people are playing in the buying process and how to deal with them.

As I discussed in my last post, sometimes we have to have some attitude and create some conflict in order to get to the right people. There is so much more to discuss about Power that we will dive into it in another post.

Vision

First off, vision is NOT the product. Talking about your product, it's features, and showing the beloved demo is not creating or setting a vision, it is information transfer. The 2 big mistakes I see around vision is being too product centric and also making your solution too small by taking a fast, tactical sales cycle for only 1 module just to get in the door. To be fair, these days, investors and boards push for speed, efficiency, land now and expand later, the reps are forced into these tactical sales cycles. I am all for land and expand, but there are ways to create a big vision (think about pre selling the account expansion) and still land with a solution that is digestible and within their budget.

Did I mention vision is NOT about the product? See if this sounds familiar? They LOVED the demo, they said they need this product yesterday, and yet the deal is still not closed. It just keeps dragging on and on and on. The product and the demo answer the HOW , but a compelling vision answers the WHY and is critical to help sell the idea all the way up the executive ranks. A compelling vision, hopefully linked to the strategic initiatives of your prospect, will actually help you have better conversations with executives and broaden your support across multiple executives.

Solve bigger, more strategic problems than just one module. In every company I have been involved with, dating all the way back to my supply chain days with Manugistics and i2 Technologies, it was very important to stay above products and modules and paint a big vision that solves big, important problems. At Manugistics, when we were tactical and tried to sell our forecasting module, we opened ourselves up to all kinds of vendors and competitors. When we positioned integrated logistics (yes, this was before supply chain), and the importance of better decision making across the enterprise, we were highly differentiated and much more valuable to the prospect. They might have still only bought forecasting, but they were really on the journey to supply chain optimization.

Later in my career, I worked for a company that offered a variety of accounting and tax modules for investor owned utilities. Just like in supply chain software, they ran into a brick wall trying to sell individual modules. Asset Accounting? SAP does that. Income tax? Reuters does that. So we coined the term Capital Lifecycle Management to help regulated utilities manage their critical assets over time and ensure they were maximizing their rate of return with regulators and minimizing their tax burden. These utilities made money based on the rate of return on their assets, so the more detail and knowledge they had, the more money they could make. Suddenly, we tapped into how these companies made money and found ourselves in the CFO's office having way more fun. Deal sizes went up dramatically and sales cycles actually were shorter, since we got to power more efficiently.

Even if you only have 1 module, setting a broader vision that you will get to one day is still critical. But more on that in a later post.

In Summary, Create the Pain, Find the Power, and Deliver a Compelling Vision to Answer the Why.

No Pain = No Deal

No Power = No Deal

No Vision = competitive, product based sales cycle with high price sensitivity

Pain, Power, and Vision are critical elements present in any purchase of any kind. It is not a methodology. It is not a process. Reps who spend their time finding, creating, and expanding the pain and business problems will be more credible and build better relationships with their prospects. Reps who navigate to power and are comfortable engaging with Power will have more certainty and lower risk of no decision in their deals. And finally, reps who can message a vision that focuses on why and links to something strategic with your sponsor will be able to increase deal sizes and maximize the long term economic value from each customer.

I hope this framework helps as you work on your big deals in 2025. I will delve into each element in the next 3 posts, so tune in.

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John Huettel and my company at Lighthousesalessolutions.com.  You can also subscribe to receive the blog directly to your email.