How to map the five constraints stopping someone from buying

I don’t really believe in objections. Not the way most people teach them, anyway.

An objection is the thing somebody says out loud. “It’s too expensive.” “I don’t have time.” “I’ve tried stuff like this before.” All an objection really is, is an unmet constraint – a limitation they’ll run into, a concern they have. Handle the constraint and the objection has nothing left to stand on.

I think about it like the lap bar on a roller coaster (I’m a big coaster guy). The ride puts constraints on you on purpose, so you stay in the seat. A good offer does the opposite. It takes them off, so the person can actually get to the result they came for.

There are five categories of these barriers to purchase, and I’ve been working with them for years now. Here’s how I map them for an offer, start to finish.

Step one: get their words, not yours

The best raw material is the buyer talking. Reviews, comments, DMs, sales-call transcripts, posts in the groups where they hang out. Reviews of competitors’ products and of the books your buyers read are good too, because people are pretty honest about what didn’t work for them.

You can ask ChatGPT or Claude to list the common constraints in your market. It won’t do as good a job, but it’ll get you started. Just check every line against real language before you trust it, because it will make things up and sound confident doing it.

Don’t sort anything yet. You want a page of raw quotes, typos and all.

Step two: sort every line into one of five buckets

Values are what they personally care about in their life, home, family and work. In my own market that sounds like “I don’t want to do anything sketchy or spammy.” Nobody wants to do marketing that hurts people.

Beliefs are what they hold to be true about the problem, the solution and what’s even possible. “Facebook ads used to work, but something changed and I can’t figure out what.” Belief constraints are often the biggest lever you have.

Experiences are what they’ve lived through that colors how they see everything now. “I’ve had campaigns go completely south.” Burned buyers carry scar tissue into every page they read.

Identity is who they believe they are at the core. “I’m not technical enough for ads.” “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.” It’s the most powerful of the barriers to purchase and the most expensive one to move.

Resources are time, skills, money, energy, even years left. “I don’t have hours to learn this.”

Some lines land in two buckets. “Ads are too expensive, I’ll just lose money again” is a belief and an experience at the same time. Put it in both.

Step three: write the negative and the positive for each

Every audience has more of some categories than others, but everyone deals with all five at some point. For each one, I write two things.

First, the negative I need to remove. What negative values need replacing, what beliefs need changing, what experiences need to be negated in their mind, what identity is pulling them back.

Second, the positive I can amplify. Not everything in a category works against you. Plenty of media buyers hold an identity like “I’m the person who always figures out what the algorithm is going to do.” That’s fuel. An offer should lean on it, not ignore it. Same with resources. Sometimes the job is showing them a resource they already have and didn’t realize counted.

Remove the negative, amplify the positive. Do that for all five rows and you have your map.

Step four: agree with them before you change anything

This is where most people go wrong with the map. They find a belief and they argue with it.

I worked on an offer for husbands with ADHD whose marriages were struggling. A belief that ran through all of it was “ADHD is destroying my marriage.” That’s a belief, a value and an experience they live every single day, all at once.

If you tell that man he’s wrong, you’ve lost him. So I didn’t. What I said, more or less, was: unfortunately for most men, that’s exactly right. It is the ADHD that’s causing this. But it’s what they’re doing about it that makes all the difference, because ADHD is just an operating system, and once you work with how you naturally function, everything gets easier.

See the order there. Validate that it’s true. Reframe what it means. Then tie it straight to the offer as the thing that resolves it. You don’t just get past the constraint, you make it the reason the offer exists.

You can still be contrarian. Just push against what the market has been telling them, never against their own lived experience.

Step five: change the offer, not just the page

The dog training offer I ran for about two years is the cleanest example I have. It was mostly for people with three or four dogs that were acting up.

Values: a lot of my students told me they didn’t want to go to the park. They didn’t want their dog going wild in public where people would stare. So I built the training to happen inside, even in your basement where there are no windows. That’s not a copywriting trick. It’s how the product worked.

Beliefs: they thought their dog was just wild for no reason. The big idea was that your dog isn’t a bad dog, you two are speaking completely different languages. Experiences: the dog had gone crazy in public before, so the training moved somewhere safe. Identity: you become the person with a peaceful, happy pet, and you’ll know how to get there with any dog you have in the future. Resources: it was a low-ticket front end, and the pitch leaned on how much time and peace of mind it gave back.

We sold thousands of copies of that front end. And every one of those constraint answers got woven through the offer, the sales page and the ads, instead of dumped in an objections section at the bottom.

If your map shows barriers to purchase your offer can’t answer, that’s worth knowing before you spend another dollar on ads. It often points at catching the buyer at the wrong moment rather than at bad copy.

Two honest limits. Resource constraints are the easiest to tackle by and large, but also some of the hardest, because if someone doesn’t have money, they just don’t have money. And a hostile identity usually takes a whole campaign to shift, not one low-ticket offer. Sometimes the smarter move is to go after people who already hold the identity you need.

What to do this week

Pick your main offer and pull thirty real quotes from buyers or would-be buyers. Sort them into the five categories and write one negative and one positive for each. Then take the single biggest of those barriers to purchase and change one thing about the offer itself to answer it, before you touch a word of the sales page. Even dealing with a handful of the big constraints will raise your conversion rate.

What are the five types of customer constraints?

What is the difference between an objection and a constraint?

Where do I find out what is stopping my customers from buying?