“When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage – that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.” – Laurence Sterne. Born Nov. 24, 1713.

This is one of the big secrets right here.

If you want your prospect to feel super good about buying, try making them super bad as part of your pitch.

Possibly, this truth is also one of the reasons everyday people find marketers and sales people somewhat sleazy.

Hell, even people who ARE marketers find other marketers sleazy at times.

But the fact is that human contentment is sort of like a metal spring. And things like agitating problems… Introducing doubts… Sowing envy… These compress the spring. They put the mind under a kind of pressure so that it begins to crave a release.

The more you squeeze it, the more strongly it wants to push back the other way.

Often, mostly semi-unconsciously, the reptile brain looks for the closest available source of relief and release for that pent up pressure.

And because we are the ones agitating that pain and building up that pressure, we also create that one, simple, easy, and fast way to release it and return to normalcy.

Which JUST SO HAPPENS to be your offer near the bottom of the page that perturbed your prospect in the first place.

Now look, I’m not saying we lie or make things up. We don’t have to. Every product or service represents a solution to a problem.

That problem causes pain, discomfort, anguish – some kind of negative feeling and outcome.

They may be trying to avoid thinking about it and aren’t aware of just how pervasive and pernicious that problem is.

So we remind them – that’s all.

You wind them up by making their suppressed and ignored pains present and real and loud and worrisome.

Then the product on offer is revealed as the perfect solution that relieves it all and makes it all go away again for good.

But he (or she) needs to be ready to make that bargain. Comfort and contentment don't create that willingness. And so we put on the pressure.

And we squeeze. Until it hurts.