A man would rather have a hole in his head than a hole in
his pocket and lose a dollar. —Brett Clay

When is the last time you took a hundred dollar bill, put a match to it and said, “Ahhh. That felt good”? For most people, that is not a pleasant thought. They know and feel how much work that hundred dollars represents. They know how far and how long they can drive on one hundred dollars’ worth of gas. They know how much of that one hundred dollars is left after buying a week’s worth of groceries. Or should I say they know how many days worth of groceries a hundred dollars will buy? So, almost any person would rather have a hole in his head than lose one hundred dollars.

When someone gives a hundred dollar bill to someone, he is not doing it for fun; he is doing so because something is forcing him. As a salesperson, I sold multimillion-dollar software applications and multimillion-dollar supercomputers so I can tell you that the last thing the vice presidents who signed those purchase orders wanted to do was sign a multimillion-dollar purchase order. They did so only because they felt like aristocrats in the French Revolution and they did not want to see their heads on a pole. If it weren’t for the fact that the use of my company’s product could determine the success or failure of the customer’s entire company, the vice presidents would have rather seen a freight train coming at them than me coming toward them with a multimillion-dollar quotation.

Have empathy and compassion for your customers. Put yourself in their positions and realize how difficult the purchase decision is.

Seek to understand the forces that are driving a possible purchase and help the customer to evaluate them.
The role of a change leader is much like that of a counselor. Help the customer cope with the forces and evaluate his options for responding to them by asking counseling questions like:

These questions help the customer decide how to respond to the force he feels.

Be empathetic—put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Understand what is forcing the customer to take action. Be a counselor—ask probing questions.