You will be able to help a buyer estimate what a problem costs them, using their own figures.
You have probably seen a sales deck with a slide that says something like "businesses like yours lose thousands a year to manual processes." The figure might even be true. But when you saw it, did you believe it applied to you? Most people do not. A number someone else made up about someone else's business slides right past.
Now imagine the buyer works out the number themselves, on a scrap of paper, using their own hours and their own costs. They look at it and say, "Huh. That's more than I thought." That number they will remember, repeat to their partner and use to justify a decision.
This lesson shows you how to get to the second kind of number.
Impact is the consequence of a problem, measured in something the buyer cares about. There are four common kinds: money, time, risk, and how the buyer is seen by others. Sales foundations lesson 4.2, Value in the buyer's terms: money, time, risk and status, introduced the same four from the value side. Here you use them to measure the problem, before anyone talks about a solution.
Money is the easiest to count: fees, lost sales, penalties, costs that should not exist. Time is often the largest and the least noticed: hours a week spent on something that should take minutes. Risk is what might happen: a mistake that could go badly, an exposure that has not hurt yet. How the buyer is seen covers their boss, their clients, their staff or their family, and it is often the one that moves people most, though they rarely mention it first.
You found the root problem in lesson 4.1, Find the problem underneath the first problem. Impact questions take that root problem and put a size on it.
The method is simple. Ask questions that let the buyer estimate, and resist the urge to estimate for them.
The useful questions are about frequency, duration and cost per event. How many hours a week does this take? How often does it happen? What does one mistake cost to fix? Who else's time does it use? What did it cost the last time it went badly?
Here is Priya with Joel, the cafe owner, after they found that he cannot trust his own numbers.
Priya: "How much time do you spend on the books each week at the moment?"
Joel: "Five hours, maybe six. Mostly Sunday nights."
Priya: "And roughly how many weeks a year is that?"
Joel: "Pretty much every week. Call it fifty."
Priya: "If you paid someone to do those hours, what would you expect an hour to cost?"
Joel: "I pay my supervisor about twenty an hour, so around that."
Priya: "And the accountant's extra work at year end, did she give you a figure?"
Joel: "She said maybe fifteen hundred more than last year."
Priya writes it out where Joel can see it, using his lower estimate: 5 hours a week times 50 weeks is 250 hours a year. At his S$20 an hour, that is S$5,000 of time. Add the S$1,500 extra accountancy, and the problem costs about S$6,500 a year. These are Joel's figures, used here as an example, but the method is the same for any buyer.
A number the buyer worked out is believed. A number you supply is doubted. Partly that is because the buyer knows where every input came from. Partly it is because people trust their own reasoning more than a seller's.
There is a second effect. When the buyer calculates the cost, they often find it larger than they expected, and the surprise does more than any argument you could make. Joel had thought of Sunday nights as a nuisance. He had never added them up.
So even if you know the typical cost for businesses like Joel's, keep it to yourself unless he asks. If the buyer is stuck, offer a range as a prompt, "some owners say two hours, some say ten, where are you?", and let them pick.
Use the low end of whatever they say. If Joel says five or six hours, use five. A conservative number is harder to argue with later, and it shows you are not inflating anything.
When you have an estimate, write it down and read it back. "So, five hours a week, about fifty weeks, at around twenty dollars an hour, plus fifteen hundred extra at year end. That comes to about six and a half thousand a year. Does that sound right to you?"
Reading it back gives the buyer the chance to correct it. Joel says, "Actually, my wife does some of it too, another couple of hours." The number goes up, and it is still his number.
Use their figures and their words in your notes and later in your written summary, which lesson 7.1, Write the discovery summary the buyer signs off, covers in full. A cost the buyer confirmed in writing becomes the yardstick the decision is measured against.
Not every impact turns into dollars. Risk and how the buyer is seen often stay as words: "the drivers don't trust their payslips," "my wife thinks I'm not on top of it." Write those down exactly as said. They count as impact too, and sometimes they matter more than the number.
Before the activity, pick the product or service you sell most often and the root problem it most often solves.
Write five impact questions for your product that lead a buyer to estimate the cost of their problem in hours or dollars.
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