Identify Pain
Together with the Champion, the Pain is one of the 2 major qualifiers in the discovery phase that are required in order to understand if you have an opportunity.
As strong pain can be a technical or business shortage that the client would like to overcome, stop or change.
It must impact the customer in terms of time, cost, risk or revenue if not solved within a certain time frame.
We call it “the consequence of doing nothing when the compelling event takes place.”
Important: A weak pain or not unclear consequences will usually cause delays or reduced budgets due to the lack of priority for the executive management!
Example of a strong pain:
- ABC Soft needs to deliver a solution by the end of the year. They have major delays caused by serious bugs, which may prevent an on-time delivery. (Pain)
- There is a penalty clause of $100K per week if the software is not up and running on January 1st. (Implication/Consequence: Cost->strong, Reputation-medium)
Example of a weak pain:
ABC Soft needs to have a regression testing due to buggy software.
What info is missing here?
Questions to ask:
- Pain: What causes the delays?
- Implication: What does this mean to you and the company?
- Is it really compelling: What is the consequence of doing nothing? Does it impact your business?