Cold Email: The True Nature of Income Leverage

The 5 key points of income leverage give you a systematic, predictable and scalable model for building a lucrative and sustainable expert business in the digital age…

Leverage —bigger outputs from smaller inputs— occurs through an orderly sequence of operations. Each phase builds upon the others to yield exponential leaps in productivity and profits.

All 5 points —offer, lead gen, traffic, conversion, and follow up— are intertwined and interdependent. You can’t have excellence on the whole without excellence in the parts. Your profits are constricted at the weakest link.

And the whole process is driven by human nature. There is no leverage without harnessing its force.

Luckily, in many ways, human nature is as predictable as the hands of a clock…

People buy things for two reasons, and two reasons only — To obtain pleasure or escape pain.

Every program, every product, every service under the sun is bought with the anticipation that it will yield increased pleasure, or decreased pain.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about pleasure and pain in the literal sense, although sometimes that is the case.

I am referring to pleasurable and painful emotions. I am talking about buying as a means of pursuing emotional satisfaction (pleasure), and avoiding emotional stress (pain).

Everything significant about your process can and must be mapped to one or both of these two outcomes if you want to maximize your income.

So your first step at each phrase of the model is to accurately identify the nature of the particular emotional pains your prospects are feeling and the emotional pleasures they wish to obtain.

How do you do that?

Questions are the answer …

Discovering buyer motivations is critical at each phase of the model. Ask people: Why did you do it?

People are likely to tell you they bought something because it had some unique feature they liked. For example, they might say, “I bought from you/them because you/they had guaranteed delivery times.”

That’s a great start, but you need to dig deeper. Remember, people only buy for two reasons, to obtain pleasure or avoid pain.

So you ask them, “Why was it important for you to get guaranteed delivery?”

And they might say, “because I was working against a deadline, and I would have missed it if I didn’t have the information I needed.”

And you ask, “and why was it important to meet that deadline?” And they say, “Because if I missed my deadline, it would have killed the whole project. I would have had to go back to the drawing board and renegotiate everything. It would have cost our company thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of extra dollars.”

We’re still not where I want to be, so I push on …

“What about you personally… how would having to push the project back a month due to the missed deadline have reflected on you?”

“Well it would have been a source of humiliation. The CEO was counting on this project to meet the quarterly sales numbers. It would have been a real disaster. I would have looked totally incompetent. Maybe even been fired. You/these guys really saved my ass!”

Now we’re getting somewhere, and so I continue …

“And as things turned out, how did the project reflect on you professionally?”

“Very well, very well indeed. In fact I’ve been promised a raise, and the CEO mentioned my role in a company memo. It felt great to be recognized for my contribution.”

Bingo! Now that’s what I was digging for. When you’re talking to these people, you need to dig deep for the real buying motives. And they are? The pain avoided, or the pleasure obtained.

How to dig for ultimate benefits and emotional hot buttons …

In the above exchange, you can see how probing questions were used to drill deeper into the initial response. What you’re looking for is emotional content. To be even more specific, you’re looking for things that protect or enhance the person’s self image.

Guaranteed delivery dates on their own don’t mean much, but when they’re tied to the prospect of avoiding humiliation, gaining personal recognition, or both … they become incredibly significant.

The key is to dig out those emotional benefits that reflect on the prospect’s self image, and articulate them…

In the development and naming of your offer…
In your lead generation magnets…
In your ads…
When you’re ear-to-ear and mouth-to-mouth with the prospect enrolling them…
And in your emails and landing pages.

Those are the hot buttons that inspire action at each phase of your funnel.

When you’re interviewing your clients and prospects, it’s never enough to take their answers at face value. You’ve got to get into rapport and get them to open up to you, so they feel comfortable enough to give you the deeper information you’re looking for.

You’ll know you’ve got it when you get to juicy tidbits that reflect on their self-image. That’s where emotional pain and pleasure are felt.

Now obviously you have to interview more than one person to do this.

You’re looking for recurring themes that are likely to resonate with as wide an audience as possible. These recurring themes will guide you to the ultimate benefit(s) you will promise in your sales copy… and the specific benefits that will motivate each person to buy.

And while you don’t want to put words in people’s mouths, it helps to have an understanding of the different kinds of pain and pleasure that all humans feel. This is important, because you want to know how deep to dig.

If you don’t dig to the ultimate benefit, you’re going to miss out on a potentially rich vein of emotional expression and phrasing. Content that will prove invaluable to you when you’re engineering your funnel and enrolling each client.

A case study in possibilities — 1 feature, 7 ultimate benefits …

So what are the different kinds of emotional pleasures and pains that course through our collective veins?

Well, in the above situation, our friend’s story could have taken a number of different twists, couldn’t it? He was thinking about a promotion, but a promotion can mean different things to different people.

Some people associate pleasure with power and influence. They take joy in imposing their will on others and the environment. A promotion leads to wider responsibility and power within the organization.

Others associate pleasure with acceptance … A job well done, and recognized as such, makes them feel like they’re an important part of the team.

Increased status, as a result of the promotion could be another way for this prospect to obtain pleasure from the transaction. For some people, titles are incredibly important. Society conditions us all to identify very strongly with our role in the workplace.

Romance might even find its way into the story. If the prospect envisions a raise as a result of a successful implementation, the extra money makes him a hero in the home. The thought of being seen as a good provider by his wife — a powerful aphrodisiac — may well be another source of pleasure that maps back to you and your program.

And believe it or not, many business decisions are motivated by vengeance. There’s no sweeter emotional pleasure than showing somebody else up by coming through in a clutch when they thought you couldn’t … or pulling something off that they derided you for considering.

As you can see, a single feature can map to many different kinds of emotional pleasure for your prospect. The same holds true for pain avoidance …

Perhaps the attractiveness of guaranteed delivery dates had something to do with the prospect’s desire to maintain order in his life. Predictability gives people a sense of stability and control. Its absence can be upsetting (emotionally painful) because it implies uncertainty.

Stress avoidance could also be a factor. Guaranteed delivery dates mean one less thing for the prospect to worry about. Less anxiety and fear of having the project go awry could be a highly motivating factor.

And on and on …

Do you think you’re getting this right in your marketing?

Are you dialled in at each phase of the model… optimized at each point of leverage?

If you’re not sure, why not apply for one of our legendary strategy sessions that have transformed countless businesses?

Let us help you to identify gaps and weaknesses in your sales process and develop a high-powered plan of attack for exponentially increasing your profits. It all starts with this complimentary session.

You’ll find testimony from experts in every field when you visit that page.

Until next time, Good Selling!