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InterviewRevenue Tech28m · 09:01 GMT · 4 min read
How Revenue Teams Can Strengthen Messaging with Buyer Psychology
Pain-led messaging has long been a go-to for sales and marketing teams, but new neuroscience research suggests that it could be time for a refreshed strategy. Allego’s Deniz Olcay explains what held buyers’ attention and memory longer, and what revenue teams can do with it.
New neuroscience research is challenging one of the oldest rules in sales and marketing. He also explains why the revenue teams of the future will be hybrid, with people and AI agents working side by side.
“Lead with pain” has guided sales emails, ads, and pitches for decades. It rests on the idea that people react more strongly to what they might lose than to what they might gain. But grabbing attention and being remembered are two different jobs, and a message that stops the scroll can still be gone from a buyer’s mind a few days later.
CX Today spoke with Deniz Olcay, VP of Marketing at Allego,to explore how the martech company researched buyer psychology and the types of messaging that came out on top.
Why Leading With Pain Is Not Always the Best Strategy
Allego tested the rule with Dr. Carmen Simon, a cognitive neuroscientist. The study involved 102 sales, marketing, and customer success professionals, many with more than 16 years in the field.
Each read a simulated marketing email with one of four wording styles: loss or gain, framed passively or actively. Two days later, researchers tested what they remembered, using eye tracking and voice analysis along the way.
Olcay says the gain-focused version, which told readers they could “move opportunities forward,” came out on top. It captured 31% more viewing time and 31% better recall than the pain-related framing.
Loss framing still hooked readers fastest, which is why Olcay does not want it written off:
“If you want someone to stop the scroll and get their fixation, and this really applies for paid media or digital or other areas, loss still works really, really well.”
His advice is to open with loss to earn the glance, then switch to gain-focused language to keep the reader.
How Giving Buyers a Sense of Control Changes Engagement
The research also looked at agency, the feeling that a buyer can influence the outcome. Reminding readers of their control lifted engagement under both framings, but by very different amounts. In loss framing, the lift was just 4%. In gain framing, it was 12%.
Olcay explains that some readers took the loss wording defensively, as blame, while others recognized it as marketing copy. The gain version cast the reader as the hero of the story, and one small word did much of the work:
“Just using the word ‘you’ in your copy made a huge impact, especially when paired with a positive gain active framing.”
Olcay shared that Allego is already applying the finding to its own messaging.
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