You will be able to help a buyer estimate what a problem costs them, using their own figures.
Telling a buyer what their problem costs rarely works, because most buyers don't believe the seller's figure. Suppose your sales deck says firms like theirs "lose thousands a year to manual processes". The buyer hears a claim about another company's operations, decides it has little to do with them, and discounts it. When buyers reach a number by working through their own hours and their own costs, they treat it differently. They remember it, they repeat it to someone else, such as a business partner, and they come back to it later when they need to justify the decision.
Impact means the consequence of a problem, measured in something the buyer cares about. Most of it falls into four kinds. Money is the simplest to count and covers fees, lost sales, penalties and costs that shouldn't exist in the first place. Time is often the biggest of the four and the one people notice least, for example several hours each week going into a task that ought to take a few minutes. Risk is about what might happen, such as an error that could turn out badly or an exposure that hasn't done any damage so far. The fourth kind is how the buyer is seen by their boss, their clients, their staff or their family. It often moves people more than the other three, though buyers seldom raise it first.
The same four kinds came up in Sales foundations lesson 4.2, "Value in the buyer's terms: money, time, risk and status", where they described what a solution is worth. Here you use them at an earlier point, to measure the problem before anyone talks about a solution.
You start from the root problem you found in Lesson 4.1, "Find the problem underneath the first problem". Impact questions put a size on that root problem. Let the buyer do the estimating: you ask the questions and hold back from supplying the estimate yourself. Most useful questions ask about frequency, duration or cost per event. For example, you could ask how many hours a week the problem takes up, how often it happens, what it costs to put one mistake right, whether it takes up anyone else's time, and what it cost the last time it went badly.
A buyer trusts the answer for two reasons. They know where every input came from, and people trust their own reasoning more than they trust a seller's. When buyers do the sum themselves, the cost often comes out bigger than they expected, and that surprise does more to persuade them than any argument from you.
You may know what similar businesses typically spend on the problem. Don't offer that figure unless the buyer asks for it. When a buyer is stuck and can't name a figure, give a range as a prompt, for instance "some owners say two hours, some say ten", and ask them where they fall in it. Whatever range the buyer gives you, use the low end. A conservative figure is harder for anyone to dispute later, and it shows the buyer you aren't inflating the numbers.
Priya is selling to Joel, a cafe owner. They have already found the root problem: Joel can't trust his own numbers. (All of Joel's figures below are invented for the example.)
Priya first asks how much time Joel spends on the books in a typical week. He says "Five hours, maybe six", mostly on Sunday nights. Next she asks how many weeks of the year that happens, and he answers, "Pretty much every week. Call it fifty." She then asks what an hour of that work would cost if he paid someone else to do it. He compares it with what he pays his supervisor, "about twenty an hour". Her last question is about extra accountant work at year end, and Joel says his accountant has estimated "maybe fifteen hundred more than last year".
Priya writes out the calculation where Joel can see it. She uses his lower estimate, 5 hours instead of 6.
5 hours a week x 50 weeks = 250 hours a year
250 hours x S$20 an hour = S$5,000 of time
S$5,000 + S$1,500 extra accountancy = about S$6,500 a year
Until then, Joel had thought of his Sunday nights as a nuisance and had never added them up, so the total surprises him.
Once the estimate is written down, read it back to the buyer and ask whether it sounds right. Priya tells Joel that five hours a week, about fifty weeks, at around twenty dollars an hour, plus fifteen hundred extra at year end, comes to about six and a half thousand a year. Then she asks him whether that sounds right.
Joel corrects her: his wife also does another couple of hours on the books, which pushes the total up. Reading the figure back is what gave him the chance to correct it. Because the correction came from Joel, the figure is still his number, so accept it and adjust the total.
In your notes, and later in the written discovery summary, use the figures and words the buyer gave you. Lesson 7.1, "Write the discovery summary the buyer signs off", covers that summary in full. Once the buyer has confirmed a cost in writing, it becomes the yardstick the decision is measured against.
Not every impact converts to dollars. Risk and how the buyer is seen often stay as words, for example "the drivers don't trust their payslips" or "my wife thinks I'm not on top of it". Write these down exactly as the buyer said them. They count as impact, and sometimes they matter more to the buyer 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 get a buyer to estimate what their problem costs in hours or dollars.
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