Find the pain, then identify the pain killer

Here’s a shortcut to developing effective messaging to influence your prospects.

Your product or service is intended to create a successful outcome. We talk a lot about painting a picture of success for your prospects. What will their life look like six months from now? How do they envision their business, their personal objectives? Prospects will be drawn to that positive future.

But achieving that positive future still isn’t a priority for many buyers, especially if there’s little perceived pain in their world today.

Your job is to identify that pain. Communicate that pain. Quantify the impact of not making a change or not taking advantage of an opportunity. If the detail of that pain isn’t compelling to your prospect, move on. You’re not talking to a qualified prospect.

But if you can isolate and enumerate the pain, you can also describe the pain killer. The pain killer is not your product or service, not yet. Your product or service delivers an outcome, and that outcome is the pain killer.

You don’t want to be a vitamin. Vitamins sound good, and they help people, but most people don’t take vitamins. We aren’t as preventative as we’d like to be. Most of us take pain killers. We address the problem after it’s occurred.

Help your prospect identify the pain and the pain killer, and you’ve simultaneously positioned yourself as both an expert as well as someone who likely has built (or at least represents) a solution that can act as the pain killer.