Why Describing the Problem Never Works as Well as Showing It

The best salespeople don't convince people they have a problem.

They show people their problem.

There's a big difference.

Eugene Schwartz spent years studying how buyers move through awareness. In Breakthrough Advertising he described the hardest prospect of all -- someone who doesn't yet know they need what you offer -- as "the most difficult, the most challenging problem of all."

His description of that person is worth sitting with..

"The prospect is either not aware of his desire or his need -- or he won't honestly admit it to himself without being lead into it."

He went further. These people, he wrote, "are still the logical prospects for your product; and yet, in their own minds, they are hundreds of miles away from accepting that product. It is your job to bridge that gap."

And the gap itself? He described it as a psychological wall. "On one side of that wall is indifference; on the other, intense interest."

Here's what Schwartz never said but what follows directly from his framework..

That wall doesn't come down from being told about a problem. It comes down when the prospect feels it personally.

Most marketing tries to describe the problem in general terms. Category statements. Industry stats. Stories about someone else. At best this creates intellectual agreement. Intellectual agreement doesn't move people.

Here's what moves people..

A mechanism that shows your prospect their specific problem.

Not a story about someone like them. Something that takes their actual situation and reflects it back to them with enough specificity that they can't dismiss it as someone else's problem.

An audit. A quiz. A free assessment. A diagnostic tool. A checklist they fill out about their own business. Anything that makes the invisible visible for them specifically.

The psychological wall -- indifference on one side, intense interest on the other -- comes down the moment they see their own numbers. Their own score. Their own three flagged items.

Discovered pain is always more powerful than described pain.

Build the diagnostic before you build the pitch.

🚀

- James

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