Why They Don't Sell Even When it Makes Perfect Logical Sense.

[John Martinez]

People Sell Their Properties When They have “Pain.”

Emotions are what drive people's buying behavior. These emotions can be positive like joy, hope, satisfaction and excitement or they can be negative like fear, doubt, anger and frustration. While we all enjoy experiencing positive emotions, they pale in comparison to the power of “pain” to bring about change. Behavioral studies show that about 65 to 70 percent of human motivation comes from avoiding negative consequences, while only 30 to 35 percent comes from seeking positive outcomes. Negative emotions, in particular, are often what drive people to seek solutions and buy your products and services.

For whatever reason, people are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. For example, in one experiment, homeowners who were told how much money they could lose from the failure to insulate their home adequately were more likely to insulate their homes than those who were told how much they could save. Similarly, in another experiment, health researchers found that their efforts to get young women to check for breast cancer through self-examination were significantly more successful if they stated their case in terms of what the women stood to lose in terms of health benefits as opposed to what they could gain.

Not all of the emotions that drive a person to make a buying decision are truly painful. Sometimes, pain is simply a matter of perspective. For example, let's suppose you were in the market for a new flat screen TV. If you want something bad enough, not having it would be considered "pain" even though there is nothing truly painful about not being able to watch TV on a flat screen. This is what is referred to as the opportunity side of "pain."

For our purposes “pain” is defined as the gap between a prospect’s current situation and what they would like their situation to be. According to sales expert Michael Bosworth, “if the buyer has what we call pain – discomfort or dissatisfaction with the current situation – he will be motivated to seek a solution if he thinks a solution is possible.”

Jeff Thull of the Prime Resource Group explains it this way: “The process of buying goods and services is all about making a decision to change. People change when they feel dissatisfied, fearful, and/or pressured by their current problems. Pain causes people to change. Without pain a person is unlikely to change. Without change there is no sale.” Marketers often refer to this as the "FUD factor" – fear, uncertainty and doubt. FUD is what motivates most people to buy.

Some products do not lend themselves to a negative emotion, but the positive emotions are compelling enough to drive people to buy. For example, one of our clients was a company that sold publishing services to first-time authors. There weren't too many negative emotions surrounding the purchase of publishing services other than feeling a sense of lost opportunity to have spent so much time writing a book without seeing it through to being published. However, there were a host of positive emotions associated with why they wrote the book in the first place and what they were hoping to do with their book once it was published. Once the salespeople got these first-time authors to talking about all of the reasons why they wrote the book and to paint a picture of all the possibilities, a decision to not publish the book could be classified as "pain."

If you have a hard time with the word pain, think of it in these terms: pain is nothing more than a compelling, personal reason for someone to change how they do things or who they buy from that is driven by emotions. A customer's pain may be centered around solving a problem or it may be about helping that prospect capture an exciting opportunity. Regardless of what's at stake, pain is always personal and it is always emotional. If you don't sell to the pain, you won't sell at all...no matter how much business or common sense it makes. It doesn't matter whether you sell a product or a service, tangible or intangible, to consumers or businesses. In the end, we all sell the same thing – solutions to people’s pain. 

John Martinez

Midwest Revenue Group