Without a doubt, copywriting is a highly sought after skillset.

No matter how great your product is, no matter how much traffic you drive to the website and no matter how successful your previous campaigns were - if you are not able to convert these visitors to sales via your copy - you will have a failed campaign.

Copywriting is essentially - sales action that is written in black & white.

As a former telemarketer & “always-a-salesperson”, I have slowly honed my verbal persuasive skills through many phone rejections and sales presentations.

What I noticed was that a good copywriter was usually a very good salesperson.

So here is my best advice on how to improve your copywriting - start by becoming a persuasive salesperson. Understand how the mind of a top salesperson works.

Becoming a persuasive salesperson is not easy but just like copywriting - it is a learnable skill. Take it from a former nerdish engineer like myself.

Step 1: Become A Good Listener By Asking Lots of Excellent Questions

In sales, we are always given this mantra - “you have 2 ears & 1 mouth, use the ears twice as often!”. This is true - I have always seen a salesperson talk themselves out of a sale BUT I have never seen a salesperson listened their way out of a sale.

During a sales presentation, a good salesperson will start by asking a lot of questions. These questions are designed to provide the structure of the conversation, while the potential customer supplies the “content”.

Some examples of excellent questions to ask:

  • “What do you want?”
  • “What’s important to you about that?”
  • “How will you know when you have it?”

The goal of these questions is to discover what are your customer’s deep-seated wants, future goals, what is their vision of a brighter future and discovering their biggest fears.

In copywriting, how this applies is by researching diligently on your target market.

What you can do is to craft a buyer persona - discovering the various characteristics of your target buyer.

One of the best tools to do this by using an empathy map. There are various versions of the empathy map available online, but the one below here provides the best questions a good copywriter needs to answer.

We can’t deny that we are all driven by fundamental human impulses and desires. They rule our hearts and play a primary role in the way we make decisions.

It is human desire and emotion that are at the core of every decision.

A good salesperson innately understands that and will do their best to explore and bring out these feelings.

Similarly a good sales letter is able to bring out those feelings and emotions and be able to get your reader to identify themselves with the copywriting text.

Essentially they see themselves as the target market being addressed and are able to connect to the copy emotionally. As they read the copy, their mind should be answering “yes” repeatedly and unconsciously.

Step 2: Intensify Those Feelings & Emotions To Connect At A Deeper Level

Once a salesperson is able to identify the motivations, fears & influences of their prospect, she will start moving to the next phase of the sales process.

The next phase requires the salesperson to start adding urgency to the process.

Some of the questions she might ask is:

“So those issues are important to you - assuming we can get it solved, how would you feel?”

The idea here is to confirm and intensify the emotions & feelings of the prospect. People want to understand but more importantly, they want to be understood.

Such questions is for the purpose of evoking empathy and allows for rapport building to happen - creating an affinity between prospect and salesperson.

How does this apply in copywriting?

In copywriting, this process means we need to intensify the pain the reader will feel. We try to agitate them. But it is not about being sadistic - it is actually about having empathy.

As the reader reads your copy, he knows that you have articulated his problem clearly and even have made it painfully familiar.

This purposeful agitation should result in your reader feeling that you have dealt with the problem before. Not only that, the reader should feel you are experienced in eliminating it.

Effective copywriting should provide an almost “mind-reading” effect where the reader feels the copy truly understood them.

Having great empathy is your biggest asset to ensure your copywriting success.

Remember, the credibility of your solution increases significantly if you demonstrate that you truly feel the prospect’s pain.

After getting their unconscious - “Hell yeah! This truly describes my exact situation!” and stirred up their emotions up a notch, the next step in the process is to invalidate or discredit all other options.

A good salesperson will point out the flaws of the existing competing products.  A smart salesperson will actually get the prospect to participate in by sharing their unpleasant experiences or unhappiness.

“I sense that you’ve been burned before. Why don’t you tell me a story of all the reasons it didn’t go well?”

Of course, this part of the sales process is done professionally lest you get into competitor bashing and ruin all credibility.

In copywriting, how this can be applied is by alluding to the common mistaken beliefs or broken promises that the reader might have encountered before.

Again to know this, you will need to have done a detailed empathy map on the issues they have faced before.

For example if your copy is selling a weight loss product, you can allude to the fact that various medical studies and reports on food nutrition keep changing. Example - eggs can be bad for you last year and good for you this year.

Whatever confusion they have - point it out that it is NOT THEIR FAULT.

Just like a salesperson will say - “You know, that issue is common and I have clients who faced the same problems. It is understandable if you are unable to resolve it.”

In copywriting, this provides reassurance and they will have no doubt that you are able to solve their problems.

Step 3: Offer Your Solution By Asking For The Sale

At this stage of the sales process, a prospect should start feeling open to buying the solution.

In copywriting, the reader might be feeling slightly uncomfortable, a little bit excited and yet looking forward to reading about your solution.

Previously, we mentioned about making other competing products or alternative options look bad by invalidating them.

There is 1 more additional choice that needs to be painted as a terrible option as well.

That option that is available to all potential prospects? The option of NOT doing anything.

In copywriting, you can tell your reader the pain of doing nothing.

All prospects have an exit clause - they can simply decide to NOT take action for whatever reason. This is where urgency is key and applying some pressure can help to make your prospect make a decision.

In face-to-face selling, the salesperson must ask for the sale (and hence applies pressure) and does not fear rejection.  

Similarly, your sales copy needs to ask for the sale for well.

As you start the transition to asking for the sale - “Here’s what you and I both know - 6 months from now, you will certainly get some results. The question is whether is it the same or different results? That is your decision to make right now.”

You can use urgency, scarcity and reward in your sales copy. But remember to make them real, honest and ethical as well. Don’t resort to fake scarcity tricks that will only damage your credibility.

Summary

No one comes out of the womb as an elite salesperson or copywriter. But the skillset can definitely be polished and refined.

It begins the same - start by knowing your prospects and target audience intimately well.

Build a rapport and connection to them by acknowledging their dreams, their pains and their fears. If you can see into the hearts of your prospects and understand and connect with their hidden agendas, their emotional motivation, you can mobilize them to accomplish anything.

You can then start to paint the brightness of the future by using your solutions. Alternatively, you can also paint the darkness when their problem remains unsolved. Finally, remember to ask for the sale.

Start improving your copywriting by observing how top salespeople work and reading up on the techniques they use.

For sales people doing face-to-face sales, they have the added advantage of observing how their prospects react and noticing their reactions - no matter how micro. That gives immediate feedback and allows the salesperson to change tack.

Unfortunately, for copywriters, the success of the sales copy becomes known only based on the volume of the sales coming in. Ultimately, the intricacies of understanding human psychology can only come through experience and time.

While marketing is considered as applied psychology, sales can be considered as “applied copywriting”.

The path of copywriting mastery can only be tread when you truly understand why people buy and why they won’t - through understanding your buyers and handling sales objections openly.