One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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In a recent cri­tique for a coach­ing client, the issue of “gap analy­sis” arose. Gap Analy­sis is some­thing I learned in sales, and it was heav­ily taught by sales train­ers like Brian Tracy, such as in his course “The Psy­chol­ogy of Selling.”

Gap Analy­sis is an immensely pow­er­ful sell­ing tech­nique. It’s also an impor­tant fea­ture of copy­writ­ing. Most peo­ple will know a vari­a­tion of it, which is often called “Problem-​​Agitate-​​Solve,” a term coined by top copy­writer Dan Kennedy.

I pre­fer “Gap Analy­sis” because it dri­ves home the rela­tion­ship between those three ele­ments. So what is Gap Analy­sis and how can you apply it to your sales copy?

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If you’ve been a stu­dent of mar­ket­ing for some time, then I’m sure you’ve heard of the say­ing: “Peo­ple don’t want to buy a quarter-​​inch drill, they want a quarter-​​inch hole.”

That quote by Theodore Levitt is prob­a­bly one of the most quoted pas­sages in mar­ket­ing in try­ing to explain the dif­fer­ence between fea­tures and benefits.

How­ever, I believe the quote is incom­plete and leav­ing out some­thing that, to me, is far more impor­tant. And that is, what’s the pur­pose of this quarter-​​inch hole? What does the reader plan on doing with it? Even bet­ter, what’s the end-​​result the reader wants to achieve with it?

The answer to that ques­tion is, in my esti­ma­tion, the real ben­e­fit. The ulti­mate benefit.

Not the hole. And cer­tainly not the drill that cre­ated it.

Sure, it is a ben­e­fit to some degree. But “ben­e­fit,” defined in the dic­tio­nary, is “some­thing that improves, enhances, or pro­motes well-​​being.” So let me ask you, how is one or one’s well-​​being enhanced by a quarter-​​inch hole?

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Through­out my research, I’m always sur­prised when I stum­ble onto web­sites that are pro­fes­sion­ally designed and seem to offer great prod­ucts and ser­vices, but lack or fail in cer­tain impor­tant elements.

Ele­ments that, with just a few short changes, can help mul­ti­ply the results almost instan­ta­neously.

Gen­er­ally, I have found that there are seven com­mon mis­takes. I call them the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Is your web­site com­mit­ting any one of these?

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Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent buyer per­son­al­ity styles. In fact, accord­ing to behav­ioral sci­ence, there are four: dri­vers, ana­lyt­i­cals, ami­ables and expres­sives. Some­times, they are labeled dif­fer­ently, but they are nev­er­the­less the same.

For exam­ple, Dr. Tony Alessan­dra, in his best-​​selling book “The Plat­inum Rule,” calls them “thinkers,” “social­iz­ers,” “direc­tors” and “relaters.”

But regard­less of the labels used, this means that dif­fer­ent peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate, relate and buy dif­fer­ently, based on their pre­dom­i­nant per­son­al­ity style. Dri­vers pre­fer end-​​results. Ana­lyt­i­cals are per­suaded by facts. Expres­sives are moved by feel­ings. And ami­ables seek out relationships.

I’ve writ­ten about this on my blog and in sev­eral arti­cles. But my sug­ges­tion, at the time, was to cre­ate a saleslet­ter for each per­son­al­ity style, if and when your tar­get mar­ket is com­prised of more than one pre­dom­i­nant personality.

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