Exacerbate the pain.

The single biggest reason people don’t buy you or your product.

The difference between selling or not, is your ability to clearly identify the customer’s pain, exacerbate that pain, then draw a clear path to a solution with your product or service.

Some pain is extreme, but most is often its just an inconvenience. And, of course, supply and demand plays a role; if there is high demand and low supply, the pain will be increased.

So, how do you sell a Rolex? What is the real pain point? Certainly it’s not the ability to tell time, everyone has a clock on their phone. The pain is prestige.

The art of selling anything (especially luxury goods or experiences) is to solve the pain of where someone belongs in the hierarchy of the human race. Humans feel extreme pain about not be accepted into the group, not fitting in, and the solution is to welcome (enable and empower) someone into the group then move them up the hierarchy. The more you can increase the pain of not fitting in, the more humans become desperate to follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and “belong to the group.”

So, no matter what you’re selling, you’ve got to make sure you have correctly identified your customer’s pain point, then exacerbate that pain by providing examples of what happens to them or what other people might think about them if they don’t have your product or service—specifically how they will either be accepted into the group or elevated inside the group. Then provide a clear path to solving that pain by choosing you.

Steve Brazell, Founder of Hitman Inc., Competition Removal®