How to turn a feature into a business problem

This is a core concept in sales but I still think it's overlooked!

On a discovery call when a sales rep is trying to understand the issue at hand/pain/problem, often a prospect will say something like "we need more X... ie "we need more automation" "we need more leads" "we need more visibility". And usually, the sales rep stops there, but this isn't yet a problem its just something they want more of and you need to uncover the business problem to have a real opportunity.

Whenever someone says I need more X, you can ask "Trying to better understand here, what are you missing out on by not having X" or "can you help me understand..what's happening as a result in the wider business because you don't have X" "when you say you need more X, how far behind are you" and then go deeper from there, or you can even say literally "I get thats what you want, but what are you/the team/the business missing out on by not having X"

It's trying to shift from what someone wants into what the business is lacking.

When you uncover the actual business problem you are now solving a wider business issue and are a strategic partner vs selling features. Once you know what the wider business issue is at hand, this will change what your solution looks like too. Initially, it might start as "we need more visibility" but turns into a wider problem you can help solve with other tools.

Recently I was helping my younger brother choose a partner to help run his social media and website, and the partner that was able to transition away from just selling social media services which is what they all did, and ask wider business questions was the one we selected.

For example:

Customer: "We really need more visibility"

Sales: "Visibility means different things to different people, what do you mean specifically?"

Customer: "We need more visibility into our sales process" (if we stop here right now the solution is simply more sales reports which every software pretty much does)

Sales: "Ok, want to make sure I totally understand. What are you missing out on by not having visibility into your sales process?"

Customer: "A couple of things. We feel like deals might be slipping through the cracks because we aren't tracking them properly & we're not able to accurately forecast each month, and unfortunately the team just isn't updating their sales opportunities in CRM"

Ofcourse we can go much much deeper but for simplicity's sake, the point is we can now position not just (1) sales reports, but also other features that can (2) stop deals from slipping as well as (3) help forecast accurately (4) get the team using CRM 

So when a customer/prospect says "I need more X" ask "what are you missing out on by not having X" or "how is not having feature X impacting ABC" 

PS if you are an AE or anyone looking to build a repeatable sales process check out www.markbaskinconsulting.com