Why People Buy Things
For some reason, conversations with members seem to go in waves. For six weeks every conversation will be about productivity or customer interview tactics or pricing and then it’ll switch to cofounders or how to get a consulting gig to support your idea.
The past three weeks have been about selling, either direct sales or through content and funnels. This also goes for trying to get people to commit to something on a landing page.
I have lots of thoughts on this, but two broader points tend to rise above the rest:
People will always be interested in removing pain first
If I’m selling a new brand of peanut butter, the most effective pitch is likely either “stop doing X thing that you hate doing,” or “you’ll never have to do X thing you hate doing ever again.”
This is a tough sell to our nervous system, which will be skeptical that “removing something” can ever be as valuable or persuasive as “adding something.”
Because of this, your instincts will be to pitch something like this:
“Try this peanut butter, it’s got tons of protein so you’ll build lots of muscle and look incredible in a bathing suit, and it’s totally organic and comes in recycled packaging and tastes delicious.”
This messaging will be 100x less effective than:
“You won’t ever have to stir your peanut butter and get oil on your hands again”
Humans are driven by problems, not solutions. We walk around thinking in terms of problems and pick products to buy based on how well it seems like they’ll solve a current problem.
Benefits are also far less believable than problems from a customer’s perspective.
“I’ll help you get 100 new customers” doesn’t feel possible, where “I’ll help you keep 10 customers that would’ve left” feels more likely.
It’s easier to picture yourself getting rid of something frustrating you’re familiar with than gaining something you’re not.
Pain removal is your best bet at grabbing attention. But there’s a second lever to get commitment:
2. People are interested in buying a better version of themselves
The other approach is to have your product show a “better version” of your customer. The thing they aspire to be.
This might seem like the “organic peanut butter with protein” pitch, but it’s not. That’s a pitch about your product, where this type of messaging is about a future version of your customer.
The simplest example of this is a book title. The book “The One Person Million Dollar Business” is a bestseller despite being a wildly average book. That’s because the title represents the hopeful future version of nearly every reader.
For peanut butter, that might be messaging that leans in on working out every morning before work. If your customers want to be the type of people who swim before work every morning, positioning your peanut butter as “portable and the perfect size to fit in a gym bag and eat before a 6am swim,” that’s messaging about the customer not your product.
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People buy from you when you can describe a specific, painful problem you’ll be removing, and when you can describe the future version of themselves they’re aspiring towards.
And, when you’re implementing these, start with pain, move to future version after.