An Excerpt from Chapter 5 of 'Becoming Irresistible ~ How To Pack Your Digital Business With 5 New Clients Every Month'
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Excerpt from Chapter 5: Using Your Client’s Pain To Attract Attention
My Forbidden Love
I remember being in elementary school in the 1960s in the Houston, Texas, suburb of Pasadena. I was 7 years old and in the third grade at L.F. Smith Elementary School, in Mrs. Rowley’s class.
To be completely honest, I was head-over-heels in love with Mrs. Rowley. She was tall, with brown eyes and dark brown hair, and she drove a maroon 1962 Porsche 911.
(In reflection, I’m not sure whether I was more attracted to her or the Porsche!)
I rode my bicycle to school early each morning to watch her pull the Porsche into the parking lot.
Being in this state of infatuation, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to please Mrs. Rowley. I aimed to please her in every way possible.
That meant whenever she needed pencils sharpened and asked for a volunteer, my hand shot up faster than the temperature on a summer’s day in Las Vegas.
I was the first to volunteer when she needed the erasers pounded free of chalk dust (there were no whiteboards back then).
I wanted her to notice me, and I took every opportunity to get her attention. As a budding marketing genius, naturally, I used the problems she faced (classroom-related tasks) as my ammunition.
OK, enough about my failed attempt to obtain my first Porsche. ☺️
My point is that when you use the painful, pressing problem we discovered in Chapter 4 to gain the attention of your potential clients, their hands will shoot up as well.
Why is this?
We all walk around with those invisible cartoon balloons above our heads, and they’re full of our problems. We walk around thinking about nothing but what is puzzling us.
When a potential client hears how you deftly deal with their problems and offer hope and plausible solutions to their most painful issues, they will not only raise their hands but shout from the rooftop to get you to help them.
Back in Chapter 2, I wrote this:
“Each person is walking around with a problem on his or her mind. They can’t help it. None of us can; it’s the way we think. What would we see if we could see each person's thoughts like a cartoon bubble floating above their heads?
We’d see that most of the time, we all think about problems. Now, before this gets depressing, let’s see how this is actually a good thing for your business.
Marketing is most effective when it can break through the mass of messages most people receive every waking moment.
How do you do this? You’ve heard the expression, “that really hit me where I live?”
If you can approach your prospective clients “where they live,” you stand an excellent chance of gaining their attention.”
So, how do we get from understanding our target market's problems to attracting their attention?
What is the relationship between the two positions?
It all comes down to knowledge. There is no substitute for the depth of knowledge you must bring to your target market.
Let’s not forget that, above all else, you’re in the expert and customer acquisition business.
Let’s talk about how to obtain knowledge about your prospect’s problems
Five steps are involved in turning a customer's problem into a service that sells.
Step One: Isolate their problem
If you’re unclear about the problem's role in your prospect's life, I suggest that you read Chapter Two again. For the solo-business owner, nothing is more important than a thorough understanding of what keeps your customers up at night.
We talked about how to research their problems in some detail. Your customer may have multiple issues. We all do. But your focus should be on the one that causes them the most pain.
For example, this book focuses on the most painful problem any copywriter could experience: a lack of clients. It also presents solutions to that problem.
Step Two: Earn your Ph.D. in their problem
In the same way, you'll need to define and solve the single, most significant problem your customer faces.
That, in a nutshell, is why you’re in business.
Once you have isolated their most painful problem, you should learn about it in detail. You'll need to know their situation better than they do if you are to communicate your solutions successfully. There are many ways to acquire this knowledge.
The Internet allows you to discover and isolate the problems that your prospects experience. It also contains a vast amount of information about the origins, effects, and solutions related to those problems.
Once again, we turn to Google. Just as Google helped us isolate the problem, you’ll now use it to discover a wealth of information about it.
You can also have this information emailed to you as often as every day. How do you find this virtual assistant to help you without hiring someone?
Google Alerts. Google offers daily search results for any number of search keywords that you choose. Several Google Alerts email me information about copywriting and other topics daily.
Surf to www.google.com/alerts to begin your free daily reports of sites and articles about the topics you need to become an expert.
You can also search for sites and associations that solve this problem. You can subscribe to and read the newsletters published by these sites.
Newsletters on Substack, Ghost, and Beehiiv are other online resources to investigate, as are online communities dedicated to your customers' industry.
There is another way to research solutions and issues related to your prospect’s most significant, single problem. They’re called books. 📚
As I write this chapter, I sit in a public library surrounded by many books. Every library has a system for searching topics, titles, and authors of books related to your prospect’s problems.
But libraries aren’t the only place to find books on these topics. Amazon.com is a good place to begin your search for titles related to the problem topic. Amazon.com is often my first stop when looking for books that deal with topics I am interested in researching. The great thing about Amazon is its selection of used books. I often buy near-new books for a fraction of the cost of a new one.
More extensive libraries will house a collection of business and trade periodicals – magazines and newspapers – dedicated to the industry, field, or business sector your prospects belong to. Knowing what you’re reading is a great way to gain insight into their thoughts and actions when confronted with a problem. That information is invaluable in formulating solutions.
Finally, personal contacts are another way to gain information about your prospect’s problems. Mining your professional and personal networks often yields contacts with specialized insight and information. Contact these people and pick their brains. Take them out to lunch and ask them to share their stories and unique insights in your area of interest.
There is no limit to how much information you can begin to acquire about your prospect’s most significant, single problem.
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