Stop Leading With Benefits

Your reps are probably leading with gain language without realizing it. "We could save you time, save you money, better quality, better turnaround." It sounds good. It just doesn't work as well as they think.

Here's why: buyers only make decisions off four motivators, pain now, pain later, gain now, gain later. Pain in the present is the easiest sell by far. Gain is roughly five times harder, because a buyer who's already doing okay has no urgency to act on "life could be better."

The fix isn't changing what you sell. It's changing how you frame it. Take the same capability and flip it from a gain into a pain. Instead of "we can get you faster turnaround on rush jobs," try "when a job needs to turn around in 24 hours and your current printer can't hit it, that's usually when people call us." Same solution, but now it's framed around a problem the buyer might actually be having right now instead of a vague promise of better.

This matters even more in print, where a lot of shops sound identical on paper: better quality, better service, better pricing. None of that differentiates you or creates urgency. But naming the specific pains you solve, missed deadlines, inconsistent color matching, minimums that don't fit the job, gives a buyer a real reason to think "that's us" and pick up the phone.

How your reps frame what you sell shows up in every call, and if they're still selling gain instead of pain, they're leaving easier wins on the table.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.