If you’re like many marketers, you’ve been taught that highlighting your customer’s pain points is the key to persuasion, but can this common approach be sabotaging your long-term success?
The truth is that pain-based marketing, while seemingly effective in the short term, often fails to create lasting engagement and loyalty. It can leave your audience feeling manipulated, defensive, or completely tuned out.
How can we break free from this cycle and create marketing messages that truly connect and convert?
That’s exactly what Tamsin Webster, known as the Idea Whisperer, is diving into in this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition with our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton.
Tamsin is a renowned brand strategist, speaker, and author of Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible. With her wealth of experience in helping organizations and individuals articulate their ideas effectively, Tamsen is here to challenge our preconceptions about persuasion and offer a fresh perspective on B2B marketing strategies that work.
Pain-Based Marketing
What is pain-based marketing? What does that mean to you, and why do you think it’s been such a popular approach to marketers?
Tamsen Webster: What I am going to consider pain-based marketing is the kind of marketing that is the equivalent of what you don’t know, it’s going to hurt you, and the “here’s your real problem” and all of these things that we do oftentimes—and perhaps especially in sales type messaging and marketing that we’re putting out there—where I think it can be summed up in the phrase “We’re trying to make the pain of the status quo exceed the pain of change.”
That’s the kind of pain-based marketing I’m talking about, the kind where we are introducing pain to try to get someone to act.
Now, the reason why we do it is because—as I say in my new book—pain is the ally of quick action. And so if we stop there, we can be like, “Yes, I got it. It’s going to work.” And it does because we don’t like painful things, but we have to extrapolate that out. We have to stretch it out and say, “Okay, but if somebody has made a decision based out of that, then there’s a couple of things going on.”
Number one: A brain in pain is not a rational brain. This is somebody who’s acting quickly, often thoughtlessly, because they want that pain, emotional, mental, whatever it is, to stop. So on the outside, to you, it looks really good. You’re like, “Yes! I got the yes I was looking for. They clicked through, they did this thing.”
But what happens is they don’t stay in that moment. Because as soon as they do something to relieve that pain, then they get into this more rational point of view. And that’s a lot of times where the problems start. Because when someone has a chance to stop and think about that rationale, another part of their irrational brain starts to take over. First of all, the rational brain goes “Wait a minute. I don’t need this. I don’t want this. I don’t understand why I’m doing this.”
This is why sometimes your salespeople may come to you and say, “We’re having trouble, like we’re doing fine getting our leads, but we’re having trouble closing the deal, or they say yes and then they ghost us.”
What we’re trying to do instead is make sure that whatever drives them to act in the moment is something that, when they stop, they can think about it with a cooler head. It’s something that they can still tell themselves makes sense to them. Not just rationally but also intuitively as well.
Long-Term Consequences
Mike Allton: First of all, [your] new book is Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change which drops in October.
If I’m hearing you right, what you’re saying is, as a marketer, I can’t just keep triggering my audience over and over again, expecting them to love it, and enjoy it.
Talk to us a little bit more about some of the long-term consequences of using this kind of messaging.
Tamsen Webster: Let me go back and add another reason why you know where there is an appropriate role for talking about what your clients and customers or potential customers are experiencing.
And that is by describing their world, describing the pain that they know about right now, the one that they’re feeling, it is an opportunity to establish that empathy and connection with your audience that says, “Hey, I see you. I see what’s going on with you. I know that you’re frustrated by this.”
It’s a way of establishing credibility and rapport that is distinctly different from the pain that you introduce so that you can then relieve it.
I remember, for instance, one time, Mike, I was talking to someone about this concept. The principle in the book I talk about is: Pain is the ally of quick action, but pain is the enemy of long-term change.
When I said this to someone, she was like, “Well, but my job is to make them sick, so I can make them well.” I just wanted to pause at that moment and just say stop and listen to that, because if they don’t recognize that they have the pain, the problem that you’re talking to them about, you’re lucky if they pay attention to you in the first place.
But the second thing is, as I was saying before, if they stop and realize that you are the one that made them feel that way in the first place and that maybe there wasn’t truly a rational basis for it, or there wasn’t a real basis for it from how they’re feeling about it, that’s going to snap back and hurt you in the long term.
Because we often toss around that phrase that you shoot the messenger. Well, there’s research that shows that the shoot-the-messenger effect is real. People don’t like people who bring them what they consider to be bad news. And they particularly don’t like it when it feels like it’s bad news about them.
One of these long-term consequences is it ends up violating another one of the principles that I talk about in the book, where [we] identify our self-concept, how we want to be seen by the people marketing to us, the salespeople we’re talking to, etc. When that gets violated, we won’t continue because it’s so important for us to be seen by people as smart and good.
If marketing makes somebody feel bad about something, great examples are buttons. So oftentimes when a decline button or an opt-out button is something like, “I can’t help but say it with this tone. No, thanks. I like spending more money.” Who likes that? Like, nobody’s going to like that. I mean, it’s far better to just say, “No, thanks. Not yet.” Because it’s just allowing them to say, “No, I’m not interested, but maybe I will be. Maybe later.”
Just think about how you were approaching presenting an opportunity to do something different, which is what marketing is all about. How it may be making your audience feel some kind of pain. And like I said, while it makes someone act quickly in the moment, it’s continued action, which is what change is: sustainable action. If sustaining that action means also sustaining some kind of “I’m not smart, I’m not capable, I’m not good, I didn’t make a good decision before” kind of self-concept, they’re not going to stick with the decision.
Given the fact that I spent most of my career in marketing when I was in CMO and those kinds of things in resource-constrained environments, show me, Mike, any marketer who feels like they have enough time or money. I was always looking for ways to make sure that any money that we spent—any effort that we put out there, any resource that we used to try to get the awareness, the consideration, the qualified leads that we were looking for—was not money I necessarily had to spend twice.
When it works, it should work for good. It should pull the right people to us. It should be based on things that we can deliver, and it should be in a position of truly reducing their pain and not introducing it.
[Don’t miss other episodes of the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B.]
Examples of Painless Marketing Companies
Share some examples with us of some companies that you’ve seen shift away from this pain-based marketing and [how] they’re seeing results positively as a change.
Tamsen Webster: There’s some limit to what I can do with my clients because I’m covered by NDAs and things like that.
But I think there are a lot of examples of what I’m talking about, the people who are speaking to the positive side of what otherwise could be a pain-based message.
Consumer example. For whatever reason, the first example I’m going to come up with is a consumer example, and I know this is B2B, but what’s coming up for me is just an immediate reaction is the company called Trashie. What they do is send you a bag where you put textiles that you don’t want and are increasingly more difficult to dispose of. And you just pile them into a bag, and you send them back to Trashie. And then what Trashy will do is if there’s stuff that’s usable, resaleable, etc., they’ll donate it, and if not, they’ll recycle it.
What that allows people to do is rather than saying, “You’re killing the planet with your fast fashion!”
They’re saying, “We’re not going to judge you for your prior decisions. Here’s an opportunity to help you get rid of what you’re doing now or get rid of what’s in your house and we’re going to make it super easy for you there.”
Just as an example, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, which is just anticipating where that pain point is and saying, “Here’s a way to relieve it.” Not “you’re killing the planet.”
And what we’re going to be doing is positioning ourselves to help.
B2B example. I’m thinking about B2B companies. One of the ones that comes to mind is again just in the very nature of their product is a company like 15five, which is this beautiful way to get a weekly or just a pulse between a manager and team member, and it’s 15 minutes, five questions, is how it works.
And again, it’s addressing, even at a product level, a pain point that’s out there. And it’s not starting with saying that what you don’t know about your employees can hurt you. It’s from a positioning standpoint of saying, this is actually like, “Hey, we know that this is the pain in the butt. You don’t know how to do it. Here’s a product that we can put out there and help you and help you move forward with this. And it’s going to solve a problem that you have. Here’s why, based on what we believe, we think that this is going to work because it’s not going to take a lot of time.”
I think that’s a quick example from a product basis, helping to design, where it is in such a way that it’s going to solve somebody’s problem rather than introduce a problem that suddenly needs to be solved.
Alternatives
What are some alternative approaches to persuasion, particularly in the B2B space? If we’re not going to do pain-based marketing, at least we’re not going to focus on that, what can we do instead?
Tamsen Webster: Outside of the ownable intellectual property, one of the only truly unique things that you have to base reliable differentiation on going forward is not your products, and it’s not your branding.
It is your philosophy, the philosophy, and use.
What I mean by that is it’s not just why you do what you do. (Thank you, Simon Sinek, super important.) Because if your prospects and your clients don’t want what you do, don’t need what you do, or don’t value why you’re doing what you’re doing again, then you’re not going to have a long-term client relationship there.
But there’s another way that I consider to be as important. I don’t know if it’s more important, but I consider it as important, which is the why behind your how. This is what you do and why you do it, but I think and what I’ve seen is that (particularly for long-term business-to-business relationships), people have to agree with why you approach how you do what you do in your particular way.
What are the principles that guide it?
Because it’s long-term, those principles are what people would establish, those long-term relationships. Because if I don’t like how you do business, there is a point at which it becomes difficult to continue to do business with you—even if I value what you do, there’s a point at which how you do it starts to get in the way.
And so what I am a big fan of and what this book ultimately is an argument for is putting that philosophy out on the table upfront because not only does it articulate that why behind your what—but your why behind your how tells your prospective customers and your prospects and your audience what it is you value and why truly value, like actual value. It also does something that I think is critically important when it comes to achieving long-term change. And that is that it puts the risk of change where it belongs, on you, the company that’s asking for it.
Think about this for a moment. A lot of times what we do in marketing is fundamentally, we are asking people to do something different than they’re doing right now. And yet the vast majority of marketing—besides the pain-based stuff—is essentially saying, “Trust us, this will solve it.” Or saying, “Trust these people, we solved it for them, or trust all these facts and figures that we’re giving to you about why our thing is great, but we’re not explaining in a way that your audience can quickly validate based on their own experience, not your word, that this would be successful for them.”
Let’s even just think about the argument I’m trying to make in the book, because fundamentally it’s a B2B argument as well, which is that all marketing at some level is trying to build buy-in for what the company does, what it stands for, its products, its services, its offerings, etc. And so this is a persistent problem, and it’s one that I’m deeply interested in, and I’ve been interested in for about 25 years: How do we do that? What is necessary for that?
What I mean by buy-in is believing enough in something to act on it and to keep acting. I’ve done a lot of research for this, and you mentioned my first book, Find Your Red Thread, which was based on one major principle of how I approach my work and message design, which is this realization that story is how we make sense of the world. And I don’t just mean once-upon-a-time stories, story structure, meaning in order for something to make sense for us, to us, our brain is looking for specific pieces of information so it can establish a cause and effect relationship so that it can say, “If I do this, this will happen, right?”
The Power of Rational Thinking and Stories
You know the famous phrase. “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM.” Why not?
Answer: Because it is a tried and true thing. And in that example is actually the other big aha. The first principle was that every decision that anybody makes even in B2B has a story behind it. It’s the end of an argument rational or not internal or not about why that decision makes sense.
The second big aha came from this idea and this realization that the decisions we agree with are based on beliefs we already have. The stories we agree with are based on beliefs, desires, and principles that we agree with.
And so, fundamentally, if you agree those two things are true, that every action ends in an internal argument and that these actions we agree with are based on beliefs we already have, then the philosophy that the book argues for is:
- The best way to build buy-in is to build an argument based on what people already have bought into the things that they already want and things that they already believe.
- It’s about putting those things together in a new way.
If you agree with both of those elements, then it’s much more likely that you’re going to agree (at least in principle) with the approach that I’m suggesting:
- What that allows you to do as a B2B marketer, salesperson, or a marketer who’s supporting your sales team, is it allows everyone to get to yes or no a lot quicker.
- From a marketing standpoint, it helps you prequalify the leads that are coming into your sales team. Because if your team, if the people you’re talking to don’t have the question that you exist to answer, that service exists to answer, that your brand exists to answer. They’re not your prospects, right?
- And this is not a question that you’re choosing because you think that’s what’s going to play in the marketplace.
- It’s the question that is the whole reason why your brand, that service, that offering exists. You’re finding something that you share with your ideal prospect, your ideal client.
- Then you’re arguing for it based on principles you believe and you practice at your organization to its core.
Let’s say they do agree with the question, that they have that question. If they agree with those principles, then again, they’re going to agree in principle with your approach, and then they’re going to want to know all the stuff we usually tell them. “Okay, show me how it works, show me how much it’s going to cost, show me,” so that they can see if they agree and practice that this is going to be the right thing for them. But a lot of times we don’t even get that agreement in principle to start with.
As I said, the reason why I think this is important is because it shifts the risk to us, right? We’re basically saying these are our principles. And if somebody doesn’t agree, then it allows us to get to know faster because either we’re at a point where you’re having a conversation with a prospect again, even if it’s indirect and asynchronous because this is out in the marketplace, or that prospect is going, “Yeah, that’s not how I believe things work.”
And in this instance, I’m talking about a sales conversation. Well, then you have an opportunity to understand where the disconnect was and if it’s fixable to fix it rather than just being ghosted.
And so what that allows you to do is get quickly, both in your messages or even in your preliminary first presentation from a sales conversation, is to say, this is what we do. This is how we do it. And this is why we do it that way. Essentially, do you want to learn more?
So it’s building, you know. I guess in a way it’s not just permission marketing, right? It’s like permission persuasion. It’s to be inspired by Seth Godin, right? Where it’s basically saying, Do you want this? Yes. Okay. May I tell you why we do it this way? Yes. Okay. Do you agree with this? Yes. Do you agree with this? Yes. So now do you see why we do it this way? Yes. Are you interested in learning more? Yes. Okay. Let’s talk about these things in a little bit more depth.
So that’s what I have seen be radically more successful with marketing and with sales and speed up the process because it eliminates right out of the gate the folks that aren’t aligned and never will be.
Mike Allton: It’s fascinating.
Of course, I’m thinking about Agorapulse in my role here and how we’re approaching these kinds of questions as you’re speaking. Because you’re right. If we just talk about ourselves as a social media publishing tool, well, that’s just a commodity, right? Oh, you need to publish social media. Okay. Well, how are we different from every other social media publishing tool? … But if we talk about why we think it’s so important that you have a consistent presence on social media where you’re constantly able to track the success of those posts and you’re creating that, that persistent, consistent presence across all platforms and how beneficial that is to your target audience, that’s inching a little bit closer, I think, to what you’re talking about.
Tamsen Webster: Absolutely. And it’s one of the reasons why I love working with founders and I love working with the C suite because it, and the kind of head of product lines as well, it’s because there is a reason why the founders of Agorapulse in the realm of all the other social media publishers out there decided we’ve got something different to say. We’ve got something different to put in the market. There’s a difference in your approach so that on the surface, as you say, somebody might go, yeah, it’s just another social media platform and I’m going to bet at your heart Agorapulse is like, no, no, no, no, we’re not the same.
But the way that you’re not the same is actually probably pretty different than the way that you typically talk about it. Not saying it is. It’s just what I’ve seen over and over again with marketing, and I do talk about this a little bit in the book, is that we tend to say, Well, we’re going to differentiate based on all these benefits that we’re going to give you, right?
We can provide you with all these other benefits, but we never quite tell them how we’re achieving those other benefits. And so what ends up happening from that benefit bombing, as I like to call it, is that people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t need all that stuff. If you’re giving me all that stuff, then you’re probably too expensive. You’re probably doing all this other stuff. I don’t need it.
But, again, it was interesting where you went—kind of persistence and consistency. And if I were working with you as a client, I would want to keep digging on that and say, What about that? Because any platform is probably going to say that it’s going to help you be out there, et cetera. But what is it that you unlock in your approach that lets you do that for people in a different way? Is it some kind of integration? Is it somehow like you mentioned success? Is it that you’re focused on what’s working right?
So it’s kind of a perpetual optimization model. Like those are the things that we’re really trying to get to, which aren’t going to be features, which are essentially just another way to describe what you do. And it’s not beneficial because that’s just another way to describe what is the question that people are asking: Why would you do it? And so what we’re really getting to is something that I just see over and over again that most messaging absolutely skips over, which is what connects the two.
I’m arguing that every organization, in addition to its brand and its positions and its ideal customer profile and its values and its mission, that every organization, B2B [and] B2C, needs a core case, an existential argument for why it is that you do what you do in the way that you do it.
And it is there, and it is different or else you wouldn’t be in business. It is there. It’s different, and it’s resonating with your ideal clients because they’re continuing to work with you.
It’s … like neuroscience about why we don’t dig deeper. So it’s not your fault. Just be all like Good Will Hunting moment. It’s not your fault. You know, that we’ve just stayed at this problem-solution level.
But remember that our brains make sense as a story. We need the relationship between cause and effect. And if we just give people, Oh, you have this problem, here’s our solution. Then it’s the equivalent of … telling someone only the beginning and the end of the story. It’s like saying there was this bratty kid named Luke who wanted to be a pilot and he saved the universe and became a hero. And you’re like, what happened in the middle?
And yet, that is the vast majority of marketing. Like you’ve got this problem here. You need this, like you need more engagement. You need a social media publishing platform. Well, back to the whole smart, capable, good thing. They know that, right? The issue is that they haven’t figured out what they need in a social media platform.
And by the way, it’s not the feature. It’s what the feature does for them. And again, that’s not a benefit. It is an element of the approach. Is it optimization? Is it reinforcement? Is it actually narrowing to be able to allow them to focus on the right audience? Are they looking for integration? Forgive me for again, going to a B2B like a B2C example, but again, we are still Cs.
Think about the difference between I’m a New England girl, Dunkin, my Bostonian alter ego, Karen O’Sullivan coming out, and Starbucks. Again, on the surface, [a] commodity product, but there are Starbucks people and there are Dunkin people, and it isn’t just the flavor of the coffee because in side-by-side blind taste tests even Starbucks drinkers prefer Dunkin. So it’s fascinating. So there’s something else.
So, I thought a lot of times I think people would point to, well, it’s the branding. No, it’s not right. And not in my mind. It’s because that there is a fundamental difference in philosophy of not just what coffee is and what it represents, but what the experience of getting it into your body should be like, right?
So Starbucks is famously about the third place, right? It’s famously about this kind of idea, though they’ve never explored it this way, the break of coffee break is as important as the coffee and the experience flavors the coffee like that. And so therefore think about your typical Starbucks environment.
It’s soft, it’s squishy. You’ve got food there that like requires forks like they’re playing music. They’re giving you WiFi.
Now contrast that with Dunkin. Now Dunkin puts one of its beliefs right out in its marketing, right? America runs on Dunkin. What does that tell you about their core principle is? What is coffee to them? How do they see coffee? As fuel. America runs on coffee as fuel. And so therefore, if it’s fuel and you’re somebody who runs in your day, what does that experience need to be? It needs to be as fast and as efficient as possible. as possible, right? So think about their experience.
There is no place comfortable to sit in a Dunkin. There’s not any place that you can sit, it’s sticky. So you don’t want to do it. And all of their food requires no forks. It can be eaten with one hand while you’re driving. Think about that. Right. And, so their whole experience is the most efficient delivery of caffeine into your fuel system as possible, like in out on the go.
And that to me is how, like, that’s where it happens and it gets manifested in the brand. Right. It’s because their deep-seated principles about what coffee is and how one wants to experience it is different. It’s not as some people’s couples therapists have said to them in the past, it’s not about being better. It’s just about being different. Do you see? And so, just from a natural standpoint, by understanding that, I have had this conversation when I’ve worked with some kind of startups side by side, I was working with two different startups that produce.
So this is a B2B example. Both of them produce heat pump-like products for industrial inserts, right? For like multi-unit apartment buildings, those kinds of things. And one of them did not want to present, ’cause this was part of a startup accelerator where I supply the messaging curriculum, they did not want to present in front of the other, because they were like secret. And I was like, y’all sort of really different people when you come down to it underneath what you’re doing.
Because fundamentally, all right, both of them offer heat pumps, but their philosophy for why their version of heat pumps where they actually make them completely different markets, right? Because just if you think about like where they would be talking about, one of them serves folks that want to keep their current system of furnaces, boilers, or whatever. And the other one isn’t right. But, like that, we have to go deeper to really understand, why did you produce your product your way. Because it isn’t just, Oh, the market wanted it. It’s becauseyou believe that that was a need worth filling. And so that’s where. I believe messaging has to start to be most effective.
Practical Steps
Mike Allton: What are some first steps an organization could take that may have never done this before, this is completely new to them, [and] they have not thought about, you know, why they do, how they do, what they do, that sort of thing they haven’t thought through?
What are some practical steps for them?
Tamsen Webster: So one of the best places to start is really to focus on … What is the question that your ideal prospective client for that offering or for you? What is the urgent and important question that ideal client is actively and knowingly asking right now?
It sounds like a simple exercise, but it is not. So, because of what it helps you do, first and foremost, one of the most significant things that it does is it takes you out of problem language. Okay. It tells you the next step that that person that tells you the action that that person is looking for, right?
Because instead of saying, Oh, like my social media isn’t working like a problem … You can reverse engineer it … You’re putting numbers on interactions. You’re taking something qualitative and making it quantitative so that you can actually figure out what’s working and what’s not.
So I would put that emphasis on visibility. So the question … is: How can I get better visibility into which parts of our social programs are working and aren’t?
Because you’re anchoring on visibility. And what that allows you to do is to say our ideal client already knows, wants, and already sees as an unanswered question. How can I improve the visibility rather than saying you’ve got a problem? We can solve it. Trust us.
So … maybe you’re saying, maybe we want folks that don’t really realize that visibility is a problem. We want to introduce that as part of the solution. The question is going to tell you that, too. Because that person can be saying, How can I know how can we improve our social presence?
Do you hear how that question doesn’t include an awareness of visibility as being part of the problem? So that tells you that your messaging has to match. I mean, it’s kind of a classic message market match, but oftentimes we’re trying to make the match in the wrong spot because somebody who’s asking that question of like, how do I improve our social presence or how can we improve our social campaigns?
They are not yet thinking about the fact that they lack visibility into what’s working and what’s not. But when, so you may say, okay, well, we don’t want that because we’ve got long-term experience with people who don’t understand that visibility is a problem. Or you might decide that there are not enough folks or that takes too much education to get the leads the way that you want them.
That would indicate that a question that’s talking about improving visibility gets you more of the better kind of lead because you all at Agorapulse may believe to your core that visibility and particularly that kind of quantitative aspect of it is key to understanding how to get that answer to that other question.
And you may even decide that you want to go one step further and say that your ideal client not only knows they want visibility but they want metrics for that. So you may be going, let’s say for the kind of data heads in the organization. That’s saying we are for people whose clients want to take the squishiness out of social, obviously not marketing language there, but you know what I’m talking about? So finding that question, the reason why it can be so difficult for folks to start with, is that they will suddenly realize they’ve been trying to talk to all three of those audiences at once.
But the case to those arguments, to those three different audiences, is very different because that first group that’s thinking about how can we improve our social presence, your case has to include why visibility into your activity is going to improve that as well as some other aspect of it’s not just any visibility.
It’s this kind of visibility, right? It’s measurable visibility. So, you know, and so, and then that’s what we do at Agorapulse. Let’s explain how that is a different case than someone who’s at the other end who’s saying, How can I take the squishiness out of social, right? Then you’re basically saying, Okay, so you know that you’re looking for metrics.
Now you need to say what kinds of metrics like you’re going to make the argument for which metrics you track and how you track them. And that’s where you’re going to hear like you had one other person who is speaking kind of the comprehensiveness of your product. There’s a reason why you all believe in the comprehensiveness of the product, right?
… When you’re talking to that person who already understands that visibility is a problem, already is curious about how to solve that visibility with with metrics, then you need to argue for your metrics and why and how you track or what you track is significant for. Giving them those hard numbers that give them the visibility that improves their social presence. So, this exercise, when I’m working one-on-one with clients in this, it takes us a couple of hours, but everything comes out of that.
And once you’ve identified that, you uncover so much more about not just the ideal client for you but who you are as an organization and why your ideal clients are the ones that they are.
Thank you all of you for listening and reading! That’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends, but don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and leave us a review. We’d love to know what you think until next time.
