7 rules to steal your buyers pain language (and play it back to them)
Your buyers describe their problems every day. You're just not writing it down the way they say it. Part 2 of symptom mapping.
Does your buyer pain language sound something like this?
“Lack of system integration causes operational disruptions”
Clean. Professional. Sounds like it belongs on a website.
Now read this:
“The system went down 3 times on Saturday and it takes 30 minutes to restart each time”
The first is a diagnosis. The second is a confession. And only the second makes a buyer stop and think “that’s exactly how it feels here.” Pains are emotions. We need to pull on them.
If your pain points sounds more like the first, you’re not alone. You belong to the vast pack of corporate marketing soldiers who “need” to sound professional.
Infact, there are 4 levels of pain language marketeers play at:
No pain at all. Only solution language. “We help companies do X.” It’s all about you. The buyer isn’t in the room. The stuff that slips through the copy police at enterprises.
Solution-framed pain. You mention the problem, but only to set up your product. “Companies struggle with X. That’s why we built Y.” Still about you first.
Scrubbed pain language. You describe the buyer’s problem correctly. But it sounds like a report. Polished. Third person. No fingerprints. “Lack of system integration causes operational disruptions.”
Raw buyer language. The actual words that come out of your buyer’s mouth. First person. Specific. Messy. “The system went down 3 times on Saturday and it takes 30 minutes to restart each time.”
Most companies live at level 2. I applaud those who enter level 3. But down here at level 4 is where the real copy kings roam. Let me light the path down for you.
Btw, this is part 2 of my symptom mapping series. Part 1 covers what symptom mapping is and why it works. Read that first if you’re new here.
Now, onwards to the 7 rules to make sure your symptoms stay real.
1. Write in first person. Not third.
“The company has a problem with employee retention.”
Nobody has ever said that sentence out loud to a colleague. Nobody. It’s distant. Safe. Not attached to a person.
Now try this on:
“I sent 2 employees home crying last month because the system lost their overtime hours. Again.”
That’s a human being talking. That’s someone who owns the problem and is tired of it. That’s the one your buyer reads and feels a sting.
The swap from “companies experience...” to “I have to...” is the difference between a report and a confession. It’s the difference of you hitting a person and a company. And companies don’t buy what you sell. People with problems do.
If your symptom starts with “the organization” or “businesses often,” kill it. Rewrite it in first person. Nobody talks about their own pain like they’re narrating a case study about themselves.
2. Numbers beat adverbs. Every time.
“Multiple times a day” is a description. “3 times on Saturday” is a story.
The number add reality to the sentence. Proof that someone actually told you this. No buyer says “multiple times.” They say “3 times on Saturday.” The number is the receipt. Without it, the symptom sounds like something marketing made up in a brainstorm.
Here’s a quick filter. Search your copy for these words: frequently, often, regularly, sometimes, many. Every single one is a number you didn’t bother to find. Replace the word with the real number and watch the sentence come alive.
3. Stop polishing.
The strongest symptoms have rough edges.
“Our app doesn’t talk to our email list which doesn’t talk to our website which doesn’t talk to our store.”
Any copy editor would shorten that sentence. Don’t let them. That tired, run-on rhythm is exactly what makes it recognizable. That’s how people actually talk when they’re frustrated. They stack complaints. They repeat the pattern because the pattern is what annoys them.
When you clean up buyer language, you remove the fingerprints that made it real. The grammar mistakes, the rambling, the weird phrasing. That’s the good stuff. That’s what makes a reader think “whoever wrote this has actually talked to someone like me.”
4. Confession beats description.
“We have slow response times” is a description.
“I’m afraid to update anything because I think the system will crash” is a confession.
Confessions are stronger because they contain both the problem and the emotion it causes, without using emotion words. The fear is implied. The exhaustion is felt. The shame is real.
5. Add context. Time, place, role.
“Our reporting takes too long” is vague.
“I spend every Monday morning pulling last week’s numbers from 4 different spreadsheets before the 10am meeting” is sharp.
Same problem. But the second version has a when (Monday morning), a what (4 spreadsheets), and a deadline (10am meeting). You can see that person. You can feel the stress. You know exactly what their week starts with.
Every symptom gets sharper when you add one of these: when does it happen? Where? To whom? Through what channel? Stack two or three and you go from generic complaint to something only your buyer would recognize as theirs.
Rules 1 through 5 are your copy filters. Run every symptom through them and the language gets real. But good symptoms also need structure and a source. These last two rules cover that.
6. Creating the map
Once you have a list of symptoms, patterns start showing up. Symptom 1, 4 and 9 are all about operations. Symptom 3, 7 and 12 are all about losing customers. You didn’t plan that. It just emerges.
Group them. Then give each group a header.
You have two ways to do that:
Option A: Elevate a symptom. Pick the strongest symptom in the group and make it the header. The rest become proof underneath it. The header still sounds like a person talking, and now it holds multiple pains.
“I spend every Monday fixing what broke over the weekend.”
That’s a header that hits on its own. The symptoms below it confirm the pattern.
Option B: Go one level up. Remember the path from part 1: symptom → problem → solution. Instead of elevating a symptom, name the problem it belongs to. Now I have a full framework just around what I call Bleeding Neck problems as well, but is for another newsletter.
For now, don’t reach for filing cabinet tabs like “Sales Efficiency” or “Customer Experience.” Nobody reads those and feels anything. Your headers should make a buyer nod before they even read what’s underneath.
7. Your symptoms come from interviews, not from your desk.
The most important rule and the most frequently broken.
You cannot write good symptoms alone. Full stop. They come out of conversations with customer service, sales reps, advisors and actual buyers. Your job when collecting symptoms is not to be a writer. You’re a secretary. Listen, write down what they say, edit as little as possible.
The best symptoms are near-direct quotes from buyers. Not something you polished into a sentence that “works better for the website.”
Now, can you follow rules 1 through 5 and write convincing symptoms at your desk? Yes. You can. They might even be good. But you won’t know if they’re true. Interviews don’t give you the language. The rules do that. Interviews give you the confidence that what you wrote is what your buyer actually feels.
A Claude Skill to write symptoms for you
I built a Claude Skill that has all 7 rules baked in. Feed it your buyer interviews, call transcripts or even rough notes and it writes symptoms in the right language. First person. Numbers. Rough edges. Confessions. The whole thing.
It also groups them into categories with problem-statement headers, flags when something reads like a diagnosis instead of a symptom, and gives you before/after rewrites so you can see exactly what changed.
I use it myself. It saves me hours on every client project.
Click here to download the Claude Skill
When you get this right, you win the right customers.
Get the symptoms right and something interesting happens. The right buyers read your copy and feel seen. The ads land. The landing pages feel obvious. The sales conversations start on a different level.
But the wrong buyers? They won’t even understand what you’re talking about. And that’s the point. Symptom language is specific enough to attract the people you want and invisible to the people you don’t. That’s positioning. Not a slide. Not a statement. The language itself does the filtering for you.