Your ICP has pains. Where are the triggers?

In messaging, marketers default to pains. Most of the frameworks we use point us there: Jobs to Be Done, empathy mapping, Problem-Agitate-Solution. The goal is to name the frustration back to the buyer better than they'd name it themselves. 

But there's a difference between making someone feel understood and making them act.

When you're writing a landing page, ad, or outbound email, pains create recognition. Buying triggers create urgency. And urgency is what moves people to buy.

In today's newsletter:

• The difference between pains and triggers 

• Why some problems sit unsolved for years, while others get solved immediately

• Messaging that comes from pains vs messaging that comes from triggers

• When to use what

Pains vs triggers

What was going on in their life that made them look for a solution in the first place? The answer to this question gives you a buying trigger – a specific event you can build a message around. 

Pain explains why someone would buy. A trigger explains why they buy now.

Here is the difference.

Buying decisions aren't driven by pains only

A broken garden hose, a closet full of clothes you don't wear, a cluttered garage. People live with problems like these for years without lifting a finger. What finally makes us act is almost always a trigger. You decide to sell the house, and suddenly the hose has to be repaired before the first viewing.

To understand why some problems stay unsolved for years while others get fixed in a weekend, it helps to look at the forces behind a buying decision.

Push and pull

JTBD describes buying through the Four Forces of Progress. Two forces move a buyer toward change: push (frustration with today) and pull (attraction to the future).

Two forces hold them still: anxiety (the new thing might break something) and inertia (what we do now works well enough).

Pain lives inside push. It's the standing condition, the thing that's true every day, whether or not the buyer ever acts. A CMO can nod at "we're paying six figures for a platform we use 30% of" for three years and still renew the same contract.

A trigger is the event that suddenly spikes push or pull above the anxiety-and-inertia line. It can be a failed audit, a leadership change, or a license renewal with a higher price.

Pain without a trigger reads as resonant but inert: "Yeah, someday." Trigger plus pain becomes: "We need to fix this now." 

Here's what this looks like when you put it to work

One of Zmist & Copy's clients sells custom WordPress infrastructure to enterprise companies replacing platforms like AEM, Sitecore, or Kentico. The pain for that segment is paying six figures a year for a DXP platform they use 30% of.

Now watch what changes when we write the message for this segment from the pain vs from the trigger.

The pain: "We're paying six figures annually for a platform we use 30% of."

The triggers:

• CMS license renewal with a price increase

• Drupal 10 / Kentico end-of-life forcing a decision

• AI personalization quote from the current DXP comes back at 7-figures

That's the "why now" spiking the push above the buyer's inertia (and enterprise inertia is enormous).

Let's look at another example from my work.

The pain: QC labs in manufacturing companies keep all their work in spreadsheets causing errors and slow operations.

The triggers:

• Sample volume growth the process can't keep up with

• A regulator audit looming

• A quality failure or near-miss

So should you stop talking about pains?

No. Pains help buyers recognize themselves in your message. If your audience isn't yet aware they have a problem, or you're educating a broad market, starting with the pain is often the right move.

But if you're trying to generate action on a landing page, in an outbound email, or in a sales conversation, start with the trigger. That's when your message feels timely instead of merely relatable.

Diane Wiredu offers another useful way to apply buying triggers. For complex product suites selling into multiple segments, she proposes identifying the buying trigger per vertical, and writing the entry point messages from there to be used across industry pages, campaign copy, outreach, launches etc.

Check out how she does it.

Open your ICP this week. Does it have triggers? You need triggers to sit next to pains, doing the job pain can't.

See you next week

If you noticed, there wasn't a newsletter last week. I had a pretty special reason.

My daughter was born.

Holding a brand-new life has a funny way of making everything else feel less urgent (I'm learning it the second time now). We're both doing well, and I'm slowly finding my way back to work (between naps, diaper changes, and lots of baby cuddles).

Thanks for sticking with me. I'll see you in your inbox next week.

Kateryna

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