Using Problems to Establish Priority

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Creating a Sense of Urgency
While there are no Jedi mind tricks here, one of the simplest ways to highlight the priority of solving a problem in your discovery motion is to get your customers to consider the implications of not solving it in the near term.

For example, a manual process that your solution can automate may not be seen as a high priority to address. However, encouraging the customer to consider the complications that may arise with that manual process if they are forced to reduce the size of their workforce due to economic pressures, may tip the scales!

Tactically speaking, to identify what needs to be done eventually vs. what needs to be done now, your discovery motion might ask questions like:

On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most pressing and 1 being not pressing at all, where does this problem sit?
Suppose you don’t act to solve this problem. What might happen 6-12 months from now? (I refer to this in my objection handling course as “turning the future into the past”)
What would the consequences be?
Will the problem go away? Stick around? Get worse?
Have you tried dealing with it before? If so, what happened?
Where does this issue sit, in relation to your goals and growth plans?
What do you think your biggest barrier to solving this problem is?

As part of his Nobel Prize-winning body of work, psychologist and guatemala telegram data economist Daniel Kahneman describes the theory of loss aversion; a cognitive bias that explains how the pain of losing something is more psychologically powerful than the pleasure of gaining. For example, a major health transformation may occur after someone suffers a heart attack or other foreboding diagnosis, as diet and exercise instantly become a higher priority than they were a day earlier. Pulling long hours at work instead of going to the gym or preparing healthy meals might be the norm until a scare turns something they consider important into a priority.

I discuss this principle extensively in my book when I say that sometimes if you want to sell someone a Band-Aid, you need to “cut” them first. In other words, you must show them the problem and get them to internalize the loss they’re already experiencing by not solving it before they are sufficiently motivated to take action. For example, a doctor might say to a patient, “When I see middle-aged men who are 50 pounds overweight, there are typically lots of contributing factors in their life, like stress, family issues, and unreasonable work obligations.