Remove the Pain for Financial Gain - Part 5 - Agitate

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This is Part 5 of the series of articles on the sales process for attorneys – Remove the Pain for Financial Gain.

The first four articles in the series are:

Part 1 – Attorneys are really Pain Relief Specialists
Part 2 – The Sales Process for Attorneys – IDAP
Part 3 – Develop a Relationship by Conducting an Interview
Part 4 – Client Diagnose Thyself

Just as a refresher, the IDAP process is a consultative sales system that attorneys use to sign up new clients.

IDAP is an acronym for:

Interview Diagnose Agitate Prescribe

The focus of this article will be the agitation step of the IDAP process. 

Many people misunderstand the agitation step of this process and they interpret it to mean that we want to agitate the client.  They mistakenly believe that we have something to gain by making the client angry or upset.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  In reality the agitation step helps relieve the agitation a client feels about an issue.

The agitation step is important and it is one of the “special ingredients” in the consultative sales formula.

Here’s why:

The real purpose of the agitation step is to create a sense of urgency in the mind of the client and encourage them to solve THIS problem NOW. 

Have you ever had a problem “blow up” in your face?  You know what I mean – something you had no idea was an issue suddenly surfaces and you are forced to drop everything else and address it immediately. 

This is the kind of situation we are hoping to help our clients avoid.

In order to do this, we need to get them to see just how bad their current situation can become.  They need to feel how dire the circumstances can become in order to want to avoid them.

To help our clients address these problems before the become crises we must understand the difference between things that are urgent and things that are important.
Each of us spends most of our day working on problems that are urgent.  But just because these problems are urgent does not mean that they are important.  There is a big difference.

Here is an example:

Paying the electric bill is important.  You may not see the need to address it the moment the bill arrives in your mailbox but once the due date is upon you, you feel the need to send out a check to the power company.  The instant you believe that you MUST pay the bill, the task becomes not only important but also urgent.

Keep in mind that there are differing degrees of urgency.  In the example above – the electric bill – if you neglect to pay your bill for an extended period of time, your power may be shut off.  This may cause you to feel a greater degree of urgency than you felt when you first noticed that the bill was past due.

Take a look at this chart.

I call this the Priority Matrix.

Items that fall into the top right quadrant get top priority because they are urgent and important – like the electricity that has suddenly been cut off in our home.  These are the items that we generally give a high priority to handling.  Why?  Because of the urgency associated with them.

One of the big differences between urgency and importance is control.  Importance can be assigned by an external force (electricity is important to maintaining a certain standard of living).  However urgency is a user-based concept.  While someone from the outside can assign importance to something (like your boss delegating a project to you) only you control the amount of urgency you feel over any given topic. 

Another key point is that importance can generally be influenced through a logical pattern.  We need electricity to cook our food, to heat/cool our home to operate appliances and equipment that help provide a safe and secure environment.  In order to keep the electricity “on” in our home we must pay the bill.  Therefore paying the electric bill is important.  This is a logical thought progression.

We cannot apply the same thought process to what people deem to be urgent.  Folks have a funny way of deciding for themselves what is urgent and what can be put off.  Two factors greatly affect how people assign urgency.  They are time and emotional involvement.

Let’s demonstrate though an example:

Today is the 2nd day of the month and you get paid on the 15th.  You daughter’s birthday is tomorrow.  You have $100 left from your last paycheck.  Your electric bill has been sitting on the kitchen counter for the past month.  You have not gotten around to paying it.  The bill is $60.  It is due on the 9th. 

Your daughter has been asking you for a specific dollhouse for the better part of a year.  She has shown it to you every time the commercial is played on television.  It is only available from one store in town and it costs $75. 

You must make a decision.  What will you do with your money?  You cannot pay the electric bill on time and buy your daughter the dollhouse in time for her birthday party – which, again, is tomorrow.  Which will you choose and why? 

Purchasing a dollhouse for your five year old daughter may not be as important as paying the electric bill. Especially if you only have $100 dollars and the electric bill is $60 while the doll house costs $75.  You will most likely buy the dollhouse today and worry about the electric bill on the 15th.  Even though the electric bill is more important (before you get upset by that statement, think about it, you could buy your daughter a $40 gift and still pay the electric bill).  You will probably risk any adverse consequences of not paying the bill because buying your daughter the gift that she wanted; in time for her birthday party was urgent.

In the dollhouse example you were influenced by time and emotion.  These two factors serve to create urgency. 

When we combine urgency with importance we understand how we can help our clients make positive changes in their lives and businesses.  In the agitate stage we take the rational, logical factors discovered in the diagnosis phase and we add the emotion of urgency to them.  Your client knows that logically he must solve his problem now he must emotionally want to solve it immediately.

We add this emotion by presenting case studies of actual businesses who have neglected the very issue your client faces.  We illustrate exactly how bad it can be if he does not assign urgency to the problem that he already believes is important. 

Ultimately it is this combination of urgency and importance that will allow us to help the client solve he problem. 

In the next part of our series on the IDAP process we will discuss the prescription phase of the process.