How to Double the Effectivieness of Your Words in Selling

As a salesperson, perhasps you have mostly been taught to sell the benefits of your product. That's a good advice, but good is not enough. I have a little tip that can increase the effectiveness of mentioning the benefits of your product.


The technique is to mention the PAIN after the benefits.

Many salespeople only sell the benefits without leaving something at the end. The usual pattern is like this:

Feature --> Benefit

For me, this is less effective. This technique cannot drive much your prospect's emotion.

Try to change the pattern into this:

Feature --> Benefit --> PAIN

Pain means the consequences or loss that your prospects will experience if they don't buy your product. This technique is especially true if you meet prospects who have less interest or lack of awareness of their problems.

Let's take some examples:

Sell benefit only:

"Using this accounting software will make your work 30% faster compared to your manual system"

Sell with PAIN:

"Using this accounting software will make your work 30% faster compared to your manual system. If you don't use this accounting software, then you will continue experiencing the complicated accounting calculation, not to mention the human-errors that take hours to fix them."

If you were the prospect, which approach that drives you more to purchase the software?

My experiences tell me that the second approach is more powerful. At my early times selling the restaurant software, I used to tell my prospects this way:

"Mr. Prospect, this software provides you with sales report that you can access at anytime, so you can always get the information you need only with single click."

Usually, the respond was lukewarm. Then I decided to change my approach to sell the pain like this:

"Mr. Prospect, this software helps you create the sales reports automatically that you can access at anytime you wish. If you don't implement this software, I'm afraid you'll have to make the sales reports manually that take a lot of your time, not to mention the human-errors..."

This approach results in more-excited prospects. They want to know more about my solution. They are engaged. They feel the pain, and the pain drives their emotion to buy your product.

You will sell more if you know how to "scare" your prospects. Try it yourself.