If you are a solution-type of person like most women entrepreneurs, then the concept that symptoms sell may not be intuitive at first. 'What do you mean, symptoms sell? I'm hired to offer a solution!' Yes, that's true. But selling symptoms and offering a solution are not mutually exclusive. The trick is in your timing. You see, until your almost-client feels you understand their problem; they are not going to listen to any solution you offer.



The funny thing is, when you spend time asking questions to uncover the symptoms of their problems, it naturally prevents you from jumping in too soon with a solution. Which means you are following my success coaching golden rule: "It's not about you, it's about them."

Asking about symptoms takes the pressure off of you to sell. You are just engaging your almost-client in an in-depth conversation with one purpose in mind - to find out how bad the problem is, and what happens if they don't fix it.

You don't have to spend hours engaged in this type of a conversation – even as few as five minutes can reap huge rewards. Precision questions make this easy. Now most women entrepreneurs realize that if you're a dyed-in-the-wool solution person this will take a bit of awareness and practice.

Here are two reasons why adopting this practice is worthwhile for women entrepreneurs:

#1: You can help more people if they feel you understand their situation.

And helping people is probably why you do what you do, isn't it?

#2: The greater the problem, the less important money will be to your almost-client. Think about this for a moment. The more important the problem is, the easier it is for an almost-client to find the money to hire you. This means you have little-to-no-quibbling about your fee.

So why not prepare 2-3 precision language questions this week that will help you unearth the symptoms your almost-client may be experiencing? Get comfortable hearing about their problems. Don't be satisfied until you've discovered the consequences of not resolving them. Dig deeply and you will find incredible treasures in your conversations!

Once you've uncovered the symptoms, and discovered what happens when they're not fixed, it's finally time to transition your conversation to the solutions that you have to offer. With this caveat - do NOT, under any circumstances, spend more than one minute going into detail about how to work with you.

The temptation to go into more detail will be strong. Resist.

Here's the rule of thumb that I stress in my success coaching: You are either asking a question, or summarizing what they've said.

So to transition your conversation to a solution, you can say something like this:

“So you're looking for a way to stop spending so much time on your marketing and instead get better results with the time you do have to spend, is that right?”

And now the transition...

“If I could show you a way to accomplish that, would you be interested in hearing about it?”

Simple, elegant, and completely permission based. How often do you think you will hear ‘Yes!'? Your success coach says: “Probably 99.9% of the time!”

So what comes next? Your 30-45 second description of how you can help them, carefully crafted to amplify the results they will get and minimize the mechanics of how you work.

If you say these examples out loud, you'll hear how easy it is to follow this template. It's a simple structure that by focusing on symptoms, keeps the conversation all about them. And it makes it easy for you to understand your almost-client's situation, and in greater depth than you ever have before.