Why Naming The Pain Beats Naming The Feature

The most persuasive thing you can do in marketing is describe someone's problem more clearly than they can describe it themselves.

Do that and they assume you have the solution, because nobody articulates a problem that precisely without having solved it before.

Why this outperforms describing your solution

A buyer arrives with a feeling rather than a specification. Something is not working, they are not certain what, and they are looking for someone who understands it.

A page that opens with your capabilities asks them to translate. A page that opens with their situation, described accurately, removes that step and earns their attention immediately.

This is also why the businesses that win are frequently not the most capable ones. They are the ones that made the buyer feel understood first.

Say it in their words, not yours

Every industry has an internal vocabulary and the buyer does not use it.

An engineer says "structural adequacy assessment." The buyer says "can I take this wall out." Both describe the same thing and only one of them gets typed into a search bar.

The internal term goes in the technical detail. The buyer's phrase goes at the top of the page.

Where to find the actual language

Not in a workshop. In records of people describing the problem in their own words.

Sales call recordings, which are the highest-value source and the least used. Read the transcripts and note the exact phrases people use to describe why they called.

Enquiry emails and form submissions, which are their words unedited.

Reviews of businesses in your category, including the negative ones, which tell you what people were afraid of.

The questions your team answers on the phone every week.

Search data, which shows the literal phrases people type.

Copy written from these sources sounds like the buyer because it is the buyer.

Be specific enough to be uncomfortable

"Struggling with your marketing" describes nobody.

"You are getting enquiries, but they are the wrong ones, and your team is spending half a day a week on people who were never going to buy" describes someone exactly.

The specific version speaks to fewer people, which is why it works. The reader who recognises it is the reader you want, and the ones it excludes were never going to convert.

Name the cost, not just the symptom

The symptom is what they notice. The cost is what makes them act.

The website that does not convert is a symptom. The cost is the enquiries that went to someone else every month for two years.

Being direct about what the problem is costing is not fear-based selling. It is the reason the problem is worth solving, and leaving it out makes the whole thing optional.

Then say it back on the call

The same technique works in a sales conversation.

Listen, then state their problem back in your own words before proposing anything. Get it right and the conversation changes character entirely. Get it slightly wrong and they will correct you, which is more precise information than anything they volunteered.

Either outcome is better than presenting a solution to a problem you have assumed.

The test

Show your positioning to someone in your market and ask whether it describes them.

If they say "yes, exactly," it is working. If they say "yes, that could apply to us," it is too general and you have described a category rather than a person.