Before we get into this week: I made something for you with Corey Wilks called the Founder Syndrome Course. It's a course about the pattern where the founder becomes the thing capping the growth in the business. I've been that founder more than once. It's free until October 8, then it becomes a $499 course. Click here to get access now. Someone tells you your offer is exactly what they need. They say it with feeling. Maybe they ask about pricing. Maybe they say they've been looking for something like this for months. Then nothing. No objection you can answer. No pushback you can work with. Just a slow fade into "let me think about it." The standard diagnosis is that the desire wasn't strong enough. So we sharpen the promise. Add proof. Stack the bonuses. Follow up one more time. I think the diagnosis is wrong. The desire was real. It just wasn't the only one in the room. Your customer wants the result you're selling. And at the same time, they want other things that pull in the opposite direction. The sale gets decided by a negotiation you never see. 1. The sale is a negotiation your customer is having with themselves.Your customer wants the result. They also want to not waste money again. They want to not feel foolish for buying one more thing that didn't work. They want to avoid admitting, even to themselves, how stuck they are. They want the comfort of a problem they know over the uncertainty of a solution they don't. And they want to skip the hard parts that real change requires. None of these cancel out the desire for your offer. All of them are true at once. A freelancer can genuinely want more clients and genuinely want to never send a message that feels desperate. A coach can genuinely want to raise her prices and genuinely want nobody to flinch at the number. A course creator can genuinely want to launch and genuinely want to never find out whether anyone buys. So the buying decision is not a measure of how much they want it. It's a negotiation between wants. And the want that wins isn't the one they told you about. It's the one that costs less to satisfy today. If that sounds irrational, notice that you do it too. You've wanted a course badly enough to read the sales page four times and still closed the tab. Not because the desire faded. Because another want was larger at that moment. You can watch the negotiation play out in their behavior. The warm reply that turns into silence. The sales call that ends with enthusiasm and no next step. The cart that gets abandoned at the last field. "I need to think about it" is rarely about thinking. It's the sound of a counter-want winning politely. 2. The want that kills the sale never gets said out loud.Ask your customers what they want and they'll tell you. More clients. More revenue. More time. The stated want shows up everywhere: in your surveys, on your sales calls, in the replies to your emails. It's the easiest research you'll ever do. The counter-want never shows up. Nobody writes back and says "I'm afraid this will prove that I'm the problem." Nobody says on a call, "If I buy this and it works, I'll have to change, and I'm not sure I want to." Nobody admits, "I'd rather stay stuck than get burned again." These wants stay hidden for the same reason they're powerful. They're protecting something. Safety. Pride. The version of the story where nothing is their fault. They also hold a structural advantage over the result you're selling: they pay out immediately. Your offer delivers in ninety days. Not buying delivers relief tonight. "Someday this will work" has to compete with "I can avoid another disappointment right now." The present always shows up to the negotiation. The future has to be carried in. Which is why bigger promises backfire. Every time you raise the promise, you raise the stakes of being wrong. You think you're feeding their desire. You're feeding the fear. 3. Sell to both wants.Most sales copy is a love letter to the stated want. Bigger outcome, faster path, more proof it works. And it loses, over and over, to wants it never acknowledged. The writing that converts talks to both sides of the negotiation. It names the fear in plain language. You've bought things that didn't work before, and here is specifically what makes this different. Not a bigger claim. A mechanism they can inspect. It shrinks the unknown. Walk them through exactly what happens after they buy. The first email they'll receive. The first week. What they'll actually do on day one. Uncertainty is fuel for the counter-want. Specificity drains it. It lowers the cost of being wrong. A real guarantee. A smaller first step. A clear picture of how to know if it's working. The counter-want is negotiating about risk, and risk is a lever you control. And it says who the offer is not for. Few things calm a skeptical buyer faster than watching you turn people away. It signals that you care about the fit more than the transaction, which is exactly what someone protecting themselves needs to see. Here's what the shift looks like in practice. The stated-want version of a line: "Land your next five clients in 90 days." The both-wants version: "If you're bracing yourself because you've bought programs like this before and they didn't stick, week one is a single 20-minute assignment, and you'll know by Friday whether this is working for you." The first line makes a bigger promise. The second one makes a smaller ask of their trust. Guess which one the counter-want can live with. None of this is manufacturing desire. The desire was already there. Your job is to help it win the argument. 4. Put it to workThis week, pick one person who almost bought and didn't. A real one. Reread the email thread, the call notes, the DM where they went from warm to gone. Then write this sentence about them: "They wanted ____, and they also wanted ____." Be honest about the second blank, because it won't be in their words. It'll be underneath their words. Look for the objection under the objection. "It's not the right time" usually means "I'm protecting myself from something." Figure out what. Then open your sales page or your next sales email and find the section where you're only talking to the first blank. Rewrite it to speak to the second one. Name what they're protecting. Shrink what they're risking. Say the sentence they were thinking but never going to say to you. The next time someone tells you your offer is exactly what they need and then goes silent, you'll know what happened. There was a second want in the room. Write to it. Go move someone. Darrell from Copyblogger |
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