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Think about the last two deals you lost.

Could you recall the #1 problem they were looking to solve? Not what you assumed. What they actually told you.

Did it sound something like…

"We need more leads."

"I want to get better at sales."

"Our branding feels off."

"We need to grow revenue."

Those aren't problems. Those are symptoms masked as THE problem.

And, if we stop there, we risk solving the wrong thing.

We all do this. We assume if a buyer is coming to us with an issue that they know the issue better than we do. But haven't you ever noticed it's easier to see other people's problems more clearly than they can? When you're too close to something you can't always see the bigger picture.

And if we're being honest, most people don't want to admit the problem is bigger than they've let on.

So what happened was we took what they said at face value, shared how we can solve that specific thing, sent a proposal over through email, and then heard "it's a little out of our budget" or nothing at all.

That's when we discount, backpedal, or do a shoulder shrug and wonder what went wrong.

What went wrong was the diagnosis. So the solution and the price never matched what they actually needed.

Think about what happens when you go to the doctor with a symptom.

They don't just treat what you walked in describing. They ask questions to understand what's actually going on underneath it before they ever consider a solution.

That's exactly the framing you need to take when a buyer describes their problem to you.

Because a finger that won't stop bleeding might just need a bandaid. Or it might be a sign of something that needs immediate attention.

You don't know until you look closer.

When someone comes to you with "I need more leads" or "I want better branding" or “My team needs to be more productive”, that's like their finger is bleeding.

It stings for a bit and is highly annoying, but it isn’t keeping them up at night and it certainly isn't creating urgency to write a big check. They wrap a band-aid around it and soldier on.

Open heart surgery is a completely different conversation. You don't shop around for the cheapest surgeon when you have a heart attack. You don't push it to next quarter.

You handle it because the cost of not handling it is worse than the cost of fixing it.

Your job isn't to solve the bleeding they described.

It's to find out if there is a more serious issue that caused the bleeding.

→ Is there something underneath that they haven’t considered or are avoiding?

That is what we need to solve.

And you only get there by asking questions that go past the surface.

Once you understand the concept that “buyer problems are often symptoms masked as problems” then you will avoid skipping past this on your calls.

Here are a few questions you can ask:

→ Something must have happened that made this a priority to spend time on now. What was it? How did this surface? Find out the driver behind the evaluation.

→ We don’t want to tell them what we think until we know how they think. Can they self-diagnose or are they too close to the problem to even know?

→ When you can get them to quantify how big this problem is, it makes the money conversations that much easier.

For example: I remember bringing on a client that bought our $20k a year software. You know what was one of the biggest drivers to getting budget approval? They were spending almost $16k a year on printing costs alone (paper, ink, shipping, etc) that our product would all but eliminate. They weren’t even thinking about this until it got surfaced. That helped justify the yearly software cost and make it a no brainer for them.

→ I want to know if this is a recurring issue or brand new issue. If it’s happened before, why wasn’t it solved then. Or, maybe it was attempted but failed. We need these details to figure out how big this thing is.

→ If it affects one department with minimal impact hit, it might be harder to get approval. If this affects the entire business with a large resource hit, we have a stronger business case.

When they start answering those questions something shifts.

They stop describing a minor finger bleeding. They start to realize the cut has been bleeding longer than they thought and it's been costing them in ways they hadn't added up yet.

There starts to be real urgency in finding a solution. Not because you are trying to rush a contract but because you’ve exposed things they’ve never cared to consider.

That changes their original timeline.

That changes the priority of solving it.

That's when price stops being the barrier to entry and it comes down to whether or not they want to commit to making a change.

Most founders lose deals and blame the price. But price was never the real problem.

The problem was that nobody took the time to find out how bad the bleeding actually was.

When you slow down, ask the right questions, and help your buyer see the full picture of what they are dealing with, something changes in the conversation.

The urgency becomes real. The commitment becomes real.

And what you are offering stops feeling like an expense and starts feeling like the only logical next step.

That is the difference between a deal that closes and one that ghosts you after the proposal.

On your next discovery call, after they describe their problem, ask them one thing.

Pick from the questions above or ask something completely different that aligns with your business or market.

The goal is shifting the conversation from symptoms to real business issues that have a clear impact.

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