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To sell an identical leather sofa, Rinks coached salespeople to use different descriptive words based on the customer: "soft and sexy" for women, "strong and rugged" for men, and "a great investment" for families, tapping into distinct purchasing motivations.

Related Insights

Tailor your message by understanding what motivates your audience. Technical teams are driven to solve problems, while sales and marketing teams are excited by new opportunities. The core idea can be identical, but the framing determines its reception and gets you more engagement.

Go beyond simple customization and build proposals using the customer's own words and lingo from discovery calls. Reflecting their exact language back to them proves you listened and understood their unique pain. This makes them feel heard and emotionally connects them to the solution, creating urgency.

Go beyond product features. Real estate investor Morgan Keim segments prospects into three "buckets" based on their core emotional drivers: desire for passive cash flow (freedom), tax efficiency (security), or generational wealth (legacy). This allows for highly resonant messaging.

Understanding a buyer persona means more than knowing their job title and performance metrics. Research their public activity—panels, blogs, LinkedIn—to understand what personally excites and motivates them. This deeper, human-level understanding is a key differentiator in a crowded sales landscape.

The reason a customer "needs" your product is subjective. Instead of a one-size-fits-all ad, create multiple versions that speak to different core buyer motivations. One ad might appeal to logic and data, another to time savings, and a third to team efficiency, ensuring you resonate with a broader audience.

Buyers process information differently; some are analytical, while others are emotional. A sales pitch will fail if it doesn't match the buyer's cognitive style. Pitching data to an emotional person causes them to disengage, just as pitching feelings to an analytical person will be ineffective. Quickly diagnose and adapt.

Brands must adapt messaging for different buyer personas, even for the same product. Just as Netflix customizes thumbnails to appeal to varied viewer preferences (e.g., focusing on a male vs. female lead), businesses should highlight different benefits to resonate with distinct customer motivations.

A sales pitch fails when it doesn't align with the buyer's subjective worldview. For example, a C-level executive's philosophical framework is vastly different from a frontline manager's. The key is to map your solution onto their current story, not force a new one.

For products with multiple use cases, like Salesforce, content must reflect the buyer's specific role. To a Chief Data Officer, Salesforce is an order management tool; to a Head of IT, it's a customer service automation tool. This targeted positioning is crucial for creating effective bottom-of-funnel content.

The person buying ('shopper') is not always the one using ('consumer'). Effective messaging must identify and target one of three distinct shopper types: the 'user' (buys for self), the 'chooser' (decides for others), or the 'payer' (funds the purchase). Each role has entirely different motivations.

Tailor Sales Language to Customer Personas for the Same Physical Product | RiffOn