Pleasure or Pain

by Donald Davidoff | Apr 18, 2013 12:00:00 AM

Those of you who know me well know that my brother is a sales coach. Well, more than that but this blog isn’t really about him, so I’ll leave it as a gross simplification of what he does. He and I used to work together—he ran a sales team and I ran the service team for a membership group of travel agencies back in the 1990s. One of the first things I remember he taught me about sales and marketing is that people are motivated by only two things—they seek to avoid pain and they seek to gain pleasure. But it’s not symmetrical. We’re actually wired to put more attention to avoiding pain than to seeking pleasure. That’s why it’s easier to sell something to someone solving a crisis than it is to someone who’s doing very well and says they want to do better.