What’s in It for Me?

“What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) is a sales concept, dating back to the 1950s, about the benefit a customer will get from a product or service. Sales trainer Don Hutson called it WII-FM, “the radio station we all listen to,” and Zig Ziglar made it a central part of his own sales teaching.

Don Hutson compares this approach to a radio station: “WIIFM — What’s In It For Me?” Whatever we tell our customers, in their minds they’re always tuned to the same frequency: “What’s in it for me?”

The concept is usually treated as a customer-focused sales approach. I think it has a much bigger meaning for the personal growth of a salesperson, or of anyone.

The Salesperson’s WIIFM

Our customers are always listening to us on the “What’s in it for me?” frequency. That means our most important job as sales professionals is to communicate the benefit. To do that, we need to listen to our customers carefully, ask the right questions, and uncover their pain. Once we’ve found the pain, and our product or service brings a new solution into their life, we can start talking about the benefit. That’s when we know we’ve tuned in to the right frequency. Now we can start talking, and our customer will really listen. This is how Zig Ziglar frames the strategy. But in my view, salespeople should always be listening to this frequency in their own minds too.

A sales professional is someone who gets better every day. So how do you get better every day? By asking exactly that question: “What’s in it for me?”

Throughout the day, a sales professional talks with many different customers. Some they’re meeting for the first time. Some they’ve been talking to for a while, and they’re eager to close the deal. With others, they keep the conversation going even though they don’t expect close the sale anytime soon.

Some conversations end badly and the customer decides not to buy. Some end with closing the sale. Others reach no conclusion and need follow-up after follow-up. However a conversation goes, while the customer is tuned to “What’s in it for me?” in their mind, the salesperson should be tuned to the same frequency in theirs.

Let’s look at what we should focus on at this frequency, depending on the kind of conversation.

In a first meeting with a prospect, a sales professional should run everything the customer says through the “What’s in it for me?” filter. This helps them identify the customer’s pain point and build a clearer path to their product or service.

I wrote about this before in my article “Corporate Sales 101”. There are certain things we need to learn in first meetings with customers. We look for answers to many questions: When does the customer want to buy this solution? Is the person we’re talking to a decision-maker? Do they already have a solution in place? Are they switching from something else, or building a new solution from scratch?

When we listen to our customers at this frequency, the answers come much more easily. Throughout the conversation, the salesperson should listen through the “What’s in it for me?” filter and build a path to the point where their product or service can become a new solution in this person’s life.

I also want to touch on the other kinds of conversations I mentioned.

When a sales professional is talking with a customer they’ve been working with for a while and are eager to close, they can also find their way to closing by listening at this frequency. Maybe the customer has set aside budget for next quarter and plans to buy then, but isn’t saying so directly. If we listen at this frequency, we can uncover that answer ourselves.

Or, in my style, you can just ask directly: “Okay, so when are you making the payment?” I’m not joking here. That’s my profile in sales…

There’s one last thing I want to mention about this frequency in sales. I think it helps us most in negative situations. In other words, when we fail to close a deal, that’s when we need to use this frequency best.

The sale may have ended badly, but we can still get something positive out of it. By asking “What’s in it for me?”, we can discover why we couldn’t close. We can turn that into a lesson for future customers, or into an opportunity to close this same deal later.

Why didn’t the customer buy? Did they find a competitor’s product or service more useful? Could we do a better job explaining what makes our product or service different and better? Can we plan new features? Does the customer simply not have the budget right now? Can we find out when they will?

We can find the answers to all these questions by listening on the “What’s in it for me?” frequency and asking the right questions.

So how does this strategy carry over from a sales professional’s growth to an individual’s personal growth?

The Individual’s WIIFM

The way we see the world is completely subjective. In a way, everyone lives in their own world. Yes, we share common spaces and we have a collective. But how we perceive what our eyes see and our ears hear shapes our inner world. How do we want to shape that inner world? The answer is entirely up to each of us.

By resisting change and transformation, or by following opportunities and living with a focus on continuous growth? By building new patterns for ourselves every day, or by trying to step outside our patterns every day?

Some people change themselves and their lives. Others keep living inside cages they’ve built with their own hands, a little more each day.

The way we look at the world changes how big it is. For someone looking out from inside a cage, getting out is very hard, and the world is a small place. I say getting out is hard, but they don’t really want to get out anyway. They’re happy inside the cage they’ve built. Or they think that’s what happiness is…

So what is it like to live inside a cage? It means refusing change by staying in environments where you set the rules and patterns, places you believe your personality belongs. It means having hard red lines. It means never taking a step back once someone crosses one. It means questioning, criticizing and blaming every possible factor for what happens to you, except yourself.

The cage is lovely, because there’s no self-judgment and no growth in there. There’s sameness, and being there is comfortable.

I think people who live inside a cage have very stable lives. Their ups and downs are always more balanced and measured. That’s exactly why it’s so nice in there. And you built the cage yourself, too. It’s lovely, really you just live in it.

To you, the recurring cycles you keep running into are just fate playing games with you, your bad luck repeating itself. If only they weren’t there, life inside the cage would be nothing but happiness…

Then there’s the other side: people who step outside their cage. I call it the other side because I really divide people into two main categories. Unless you’re a child who hasn’t yet started the process of individuation, you either have a cage or you don’t. Stepping outside it is the real thing, because it’s a painful journey. The easy thing is to stay inside.

Stepping outside the cage starts with noticing the recurring cycles. When something happens to you, you first need to question yourself. Outside the cage, you can only change yourself. You can’t change anyone else, because your area of responsibility is you. You’re focused on your own world.

When you look at your recurring cycles and ask what you did wrong in each one, you can find the right path. You also know this won’t happen all at once, like magic. It will take time.

As I said at the start, stepping outside the cage is a path we build by asking “What’s in it for me?” and seizing opportunities.

Anything that happens to us can be a negative or a positive experience. Focusing on what’s in it for us creates room for growth. It’s very easy to blame the people around us and stay inside the cage. What’s hard, but serves a bigger purpose, is asking: “So what did I do wrong? What can I learn from this for myself? How can I benefit from this?”

It means finding an answer to “What’s in it for me?” by questioning yourself, your behavior, the way you talk, and everything you do… There’s an important distinction here: you should question yourself with love. The goal isn’t to find a mistake and end up hating yourself. It’s simply to find something we can do better and focus on growing. Because, just like in a sales professional’s daily life, the goal is always to keep getting better.

You might be a sales professional, or someone who cares about personal growth. Either way, we live our lives around two main questions. Do we want to build a cage out of rigid thinking, a mindset that rejects change, and our red lines? Or do we want to create a free life where we turn everything that happens to us, big or small, into an opportunity by asking “What’s in it for me?”

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