The Mistake That Costs Coaches Thousands: Sell the Problem Before You Sell the Solution

There is a mistake that costs consultants thousands in lost revenue every single month.

It is not a pricing mistake. It is not a marketing budget mistake. And it is certainly not a lack of talent.

It is this. We jump straight to the cure before the person in front of us has properly felt the ache.

And I understand exactly why we do it. You and I both know the temptation. We are proud of our programme, our workshop, our new course. We have spent months building it. So the moment somebody shows a flicker of interest, out it all comes.

Yet here is the difficulty. If our audience cannot feel the ache that we are about to fix, then every word about the cure is completely wasted.

If they cannot feel the ache, they will never pay for the cure.

So in this article I want to give you a simple framework that makes people think, that is me. Which is exactly what we want them to think, long before we mention our solution.

What You Will Find in This Article

• The Mistake That Costs Thousands Every Month
• Why We Rush Straight to the Pitch
• The Emotional Gap: Numbers Do Not Move People
• The Present Pain Frame
• The Contrast Question: What If Nothing Changes?
• Why Selling the Problem Converts So Well
• The Six Stage Formula I Have Used for Years
• Three Ways People Get This Wrong
• Five Practical Moves You Can Make This Week
• People Do Not Buy Coaching, They Buy Hope
• Your Next Step

                         The Mistake That Costs Thousands Every Month

Let me describe the mistake precisely, because it hides in plain sight.

A prospective client asks what you do. And you tell them. You explain the six modules, the twelve week structure, the accountability calls, the workbook, the community, the follow up session at the end.

It is all accurate. It is all genuinely good. And it lands on absolutely nothing.

Because the person listening has not yet said to themselves, out loud and in their own head, I have a problem and I want it gone.

Until that sentence has formed in their mind, your beautifully constructed programme is simply information. Interesting, perhaps. Impressive, possibly. But not something worth paying for.

The cost of this is not one lost sale. It is a lost sale in almost every conversation, every week, for years. That is what makes it so expensive and so quiet.

                         Why We Rush Straight to the Pitch

I want to be fair to us all here, because the reason we do this is rather a decent one.

Most of the people I work with are in what I call the helping industry. Coaches, consultants, trainers, speakers, accountants, therapists, advisers. People who came into this work because they wanted to make a difference.

So when somebody describes a difficulty, our instinct is to help immediately. We want to relieve the discomfort. We are, quite literally, trained to solve.

There is a second reason too, and it is worth naming. Talking about our solution feels safe. It is our territory. We know it inside out. Sitting quietly with somebody else's pain feels far more exposed.

And there is a third. We are worried about being manipulative. We have all met the salesperson who pokes at a wound to make a commission, and we would rather do almost anything than be mistaken for that person.

Yet naming somebody's difficulty accurately and with care is not manipulation. It is the single kindest thing we can do for a person who has been struggling on quietly and thinking it must just be them.

                         The Emotional Gap: Numbers Do Not Move People

Here is the first of the three moves, and I call it closing the emotional gap.

Professionals describe problems with spreadsheets. Leads are down 27 per cent. Conversion has dropped from 1 in 4 to 1 in 9. Utilisation is at 61 per cent.

Now, as you and I know, numbers matter. Numbers are how we run a business properly. But numbers do not move anybody. Emotion moves people, and emotion is where action always begins.

So instead of the spreadsheet version, try the human version.

You are grinding through 60 hour weeks. You are lying awake until two in the morning wondering where the next client will come from.

Do you see the difference? Same situation. Entirely different effect.

The first version is a fact about a business. The second version is a description of a life. And people do not buy solutions to facts. They buy changes to their lives.

Numbers matter. Emotion moves. Action always begins with emotion.

Notice as well that the emotional version is more specific, not less. Two in the morning is a real time. Sixty hours is a real week. Specificity has verisimilitude, and it is precision that makes a description feel true rather than generic.

                         The Present Pain Frame

The second move is what I call the present pain frame.

Before we introduce the remedy, we paint the current reality. And two pictures are usually enough.

Let me show you what that sounds like in practice.

If you are forever tweaking your website, refreshing LinkedIn, and still looking at an empty diary, it is not just frustrating. It can sap your confidence. It can steal the hours you set aside for your family, for your friends, or simply for being you.

That second sentence is the one that does the work. The first sentence describes an activity. The second one describes what the activity is taking away.

And when people nod along at that picture, something rather lovely happens. They feel understood, perhaps for the first time this week.

That feeling of being understood is worth more than any clever feature list you could ever write. It is also the foundation of everything else, which is why I have written separately about reading the person in front of you during a conversation.

                         The Contrast Question: What If Nothing Changes?

The third move is the contrast question, and it is the gentlest of the three.

We simply and quietly show the price of standing still.

You could keep posting articles and ideas that disappear in the feed. You could keep hoping the next referral will land. And yet, if that worked, you would probably be fully booked already, would you not?

Now look closely at what just happened there. I made a statement, and then I asked a question. If the reader answers the question, they have accepted the statement. It is one of my favourite devices in the whole of persuasion and it works because the person arrives at the conclusion themselves.

That is not pressure. That is clarity. And clarity is persuasive.

The contrast question also does something the other two moves cannot. It quietly makes doing nothing an active choice rather than a default. Most people do not decline our help. They simply never decide, and the diary fills with other things, and a year goes by.

That is not pressure. That is clarity. And clarity is persuasive.

                         Why Selling the Problem Converts So Well

Let me give you the reason underneath all of this, because once you see it you will never quite un-see it.

Our service is merely a bridge between where somebody is and where they want to be.

And unless a person truly wants to leave where they are now, then a bridge is completely irrelevant. You can build the finest bridge in the country. If nobody wants to cross the river, nobody is buying a ticket.

So when we spend proper time selling the problem, three good things happen.

• People slow down. The scrolling stops. The half listening stops. Something in the description has caught them.
• They listen far more intently. You are no longer a supplier making a case. You are somebody who appears to understand their situation.
• They start asking how they could cross that river. And this is my favourite, because at that point the whole dynamic has reversed.

That third one deserves a sentence of its own. When somebody asks you how they might get from where they are to where they want to be, you have a client and not a chase.

I would rather have one conversation like that than fifty follow up emails. And so, I suspect, would you.

It is also, incidentally, why the moment of asking becomes so much easier. If you would like the detail on that, I have written about how you know when to close the sale and what learning to water ski taught me about it.

                         The Six Stage Formula I Have Used for Years

The three moves above are what you use in a conversation. When you are writing something, whether that is a report, an email, a landing page or a lead magnet, I would like to give you the formula I have used for more than twenty five years.

Six stages, in this order.

Notice that stages two and three come before stage four. That is not an accident and it is not a stylistic preference. It is the whole point.

Notice something else as well. Resistance is created through a lack of clarity. Every one of those six stages exists to remove a different kind of fog, which is why the sequence matters as much as the content.

I used this exact formula to create a report over twenty five years ago about the seven big mistakes business owners were unwittingly making. It formed the central part of my marketing for several years and brought thousands of leads to the top of my funnel. Not because the solution was so remarkable, but because the problem was so precisely named.

                         Three Ways People Get This Wrong

Now, having taught this for a good many years, let me save you the three mistakes I see most often.

The first is inventing pain that is not there. If you describe a problem your reader does not actually have, you have not built rapport. You have shown them you do not know them. Describe only what you have genuinely heard from real clients, in the words they genuinely used.

The second is staying in the pain too long. Two pictures. That really is enough. Beyond that, the person stops feeling understood and starts feeling worked on, and the whole thing collapses. The purpose is recognition, not distress.

The third is describing the pain and then never offering the bridge. I see this constantly on social media. A beautifully written post about how hard everything is, and then nothing. That is not persuasion. That is just making people feel worse on a Tuesday morning. If you name the hurt, you have a duty to point at the door.

Get those three right and this becomes one of the most ethical things in your whole toolkit rather than one of the least.

                         Five Practical Moves You Can Make This Week

So here are five things you can do in the next seven days. None of them takes long. All of them work.

• One. Audit your homepage headline. Read it as a stranger would. Does it spotlight the problem your client is living with, or does it jump straight to your process? If it names your method, your framework or your number of years in business, it is talking about you.
• Two. Open your next call differently. Try, here is what many people in your position are struggling with at the moment, and then describe it. Then stop and watch them nod.
• Three. Post a short video that begins, if this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Then describe the day to day reality for sixty seconds before you say a single word about what you do.
• Four. Rewrite your next email to lead with present pain rather than features. One email. Compare the replies. You will not need me to tell you which version worked.
• Five. Ask your current clients one question. What was the biggest hidden cost for you before we sorted this out? Then, with their permission of course, quote them. Their words will be better than yours, and they will carry the weight of proof.

That last one is the highest value hour you will spend this month. Your clients will hand you the exact language your future clients are already using in their own heads.

                         People Do Not Buy Coaching, They Buy Hope

Here is the truth of it, and I want to put it as plainly as I can.

People never buy coaching. They never buy consulting. They never buy training, or accountancy, or advice.

They buy hope.

Hope that life can change. Hope that somebody understands them. And hope that the next chapter of their life will be better than the last one.

Hope only works if we first name the hurt.

So our task is to articulate that hurt so accurately, and so warmly, that the person feels understood before they ever feel sold to.

Not that we ever want them to feel sold to. After all, as you and I know, we learn how to sell, we stop selling, and we allow people to buy.

That shift can make all the difference. And it is the same principle at work when we stop selling time and start selling transformation, because in both cases we are moving the conversation away from what we do and towards what it means for them.

                         Your Next Step

Choose one conversation this week. Just one.

Before you say a word about what you do, describe where the person is right now. Two pictures. What is happening day to day, and what it is costing them.

Then ask the contrast question. And then be quiet.

You may be surprised how quickly the other person starts asking you how to cross the river.

I wish you every success in all your adventures in life.

Peter

Peter Thomson

'The UK's Most Prolific Business Development Author'

PS: If you would like more clients arriving already understanding the problem you solve, that is exactly what a well written lead magnet does for you. You will find my thinking on that in using a book as the ultimate lead magnet.