Business Development Professionals learn that people ultimately buy to avoid or overcome what they perceive to be a problem, dissatisfaction, disappointment, or disillusionment. People buy to avoid a negative, not to pursue a positive. 
 
The negative is often described as the prospect’s pain. It is important to understand that the prospect does not initially tell you what their pain is. Even prospects who admit they have problems will tend to discount, intellectualize or deflect the real issue. They have learned that if they give the intellectual or superficial symptoms of the problem, the typical salesperson is satisfied. It is the responsibility of the Business Development Professional during a diagnostic pain interview to dig behind the intellectual information that is given and ask, “What does that mean? Why is that? What is the problem that is driving this?” Using questions to get beyond the symptoms to the root cause of the pain is rather like a medical practitioner asking probing questions during a medical examination.
 
Business Development Professionals understand the Principle of the First Cause which says, “For a person to have a need to buy, they must have a problem or issue to avoid.”  Identifying how that issue or problem affects a person on an individual basis is referred to as “first-person, personal pain”, which is the real driving force motivating an individual to seek a solution.
 
Business Development Professionals understand that the problem prospects bring is never the real problem, but rather the intellectualization, the symptoms or the deflecting issues relating to it.