# What's In It For Me? What WIIFM Means and How to Answer It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/whats-in-it-for-me/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/whats-in-it-for-me.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving influence at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer What's in it for me (WIIFM) means framing your ask around what the other person gains. Here's what it means at work, how to find it, and how to stay honest. ## Key facts - Title: What's In It For Me? What WIIFM Means and How to Answer It - Category: Influence - Primary skill: Influence - Related skills: Communication, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: whats in it for me - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/whats-in-it-for-me/ ## What this page covers - What's in it for me (WIIFM) means framing your ask around what the other person gains. Here's what it means at work, how to find it, and how to stay honest. - Practical guidance for whats in it for me - How this topic connects to Influence ## Detailed explanation You explain your idea clearly, everyone nods, and then nothing happens. What's in it for me — usually shortened to WIIFM — is the question every listener silently asks before agreeing to anything, and it's the one your proposal didn't answer. Answering it means describing your idea in terms of what the other person stands to gain, rather than what you want from them. Same proposal, different subject. That sounds obvious until you try it on a real request, at which point the harder questions arrive: how do you find out what someone actually wants, what do you offer when you have nothing to give, and is any of this manipulation? Those are the ones worth answering. ## What does WIIFM stand for? WIIFM stands for "what's in it for me." You'll hear it spoken aloud as a word — some writers spell it out as "wiff-em" — in sales meetings, training sessions, and change briefings, and see it written as shorthand in decks and project plans. It gets used two ways. Sometimes it names the question your audience is asking: "what's their WIIFM here?" Sometimes it names the answer you're supposed to give them: "this email needs a stronger WIIFM." Both point at the same thing — the benefit, stated from the receiver's side rather than yours. ## What does "what's in it for me" actually mean at work? Most of what's written about WIIFM comes from sales and marketing, which makes it easy to assume it's a technique for selling to strangers. The heavier real-world use is internal. Panorama Consulting and InvGate both treat it as a change-management tool: when a company rolls out a new CRM or ERP system, adoption rises when employees hear that the system removes their manual data entry and cuts their own error rate — not when they hear the organization's efficiency targets. Nothing is being sold there. Someone simply translated a decision out of the deciders' language and into the language of the people it lands on. That translation is the entire move, and it works exactly the same way when the thing you want is twenty minutes of a colleague's time. ## Isn't answering "what's in it for me" just manipulation? It can be, and the objection deserves a straight answer rather than the silence it gets on most glossary pages. Writing in The Startup, Kimberley Payne puts the critical case bluntly: in practice WIIFM often amounts to *we built this thing, we never asked whether you wanted it, and now we'll pretend we did it for you*. Marcy Heim makes a related argument: the vocabulary around it is much of why persuasion work feels grubby to the people doing it. The line is not subtle once you look for it. A benefit you discovered by finding out what the other person is actually dealing with is persuasion. A benefit you invented afterward to decorate a decision already made is manipulation, and people detect it faster than you'd expect. One practical test: are you willing to say the drawbacks out loud too? If you are, you're on the right side of the line. If naming a single downside would collapse your case, the case was never really theirs. ## How do I find out someone's WIIFM if they won't tell me? You mostly can't ask outright. What people say they want and what actually moves them tend to diverge, and this is the one question the top-ranking sources leave conspicuously open — plenty of advice to "understand your audience," almost no procedure for doing it. Treat it as research rather than a conversation opener. Three sources do most of the work. What the person is measured on: their targets, their review, what their own manager chases them about. What they complain about: complaints are unmet interests, volunteered for free. And what they've said yes to before, which tells you more than any stated preference. Then ask questions about their situation instead of your request — what's making this quarter hard, what they'd fix first if they could. Five minutes of that beats an hour of pitching. ## What counts as a benefit if I can't offer money or a promotion? Almost none of the benefits that work in practice are financial. In the change-management guidance from ERE and Clockwork, the motivations that actually move people are things like a chance to lead a workstream, visibility with people who matter, a stretch into a skill they want, or a first go at running something. Both sources make the same secondary point: people have more than one WIIFM, and they're rarely the ones you'd have guessed. The available list is longer than it looks. Saved time. Fewer interruptions later. Being consulted rather than informed. Getting a problem off their desk. Looking good in front of their own manager. None of these costs you anything, and every one of them is real. ## What if there genuinely isn't anything in it for them? Sometimes there isn't, and the honest move is to say so. Manufacturing a benefit is precisely the failure described above, and it costs you more than the request is worth. You still have three options. Ask plainly, [as a favor](/knowledge/teamwork/ask-for-help-at-work/), with no dressing — being willing to ask is a skill in itself, and the worst available answer is no. Shrink the ask until its cost matches what you can genuinely offer: twenty minutes of review rather than joint ownership of the project. Or take a smaller win now and come back once you've built something worth trading on. What you shouldn't do is repackage an unattractive request as a generous one. That's the move that makes the next request harder. ## Where does the WIIFM go in an email or a pitch? Early, and not only once. ERE's guidance is to build a short statement — three or four sentences covering what's happening, why, and what it means for the person reading — and then to segment it, because different groups are affected differently and each deserves its own version rather than one message addressed to nobody in particular. Placement follows the same logic as any clear message. Main point first. The benefit in their terms before your reasoning. The ask stated plainly rather than implied. In an email that means the [first two lines](/knowledge/communication/email-opening-sentence/), not the fourth paragraph. In a meeting it means [before you open the deck](/knowledge/influence/pitching-ideas/), not in the summary slide at the end. ## How do I use this when I'm junior and have no authority? This is where the concept gets oversold. Framing doesn't create [credibility](/knowledge/influence/professional-credibility/); it only spends it. If someone doesn't yet trust that you deliver what you commit to, no amount of receiver-focused wording carries a request across. The groundwork is ordinary and visible, though. Do what you said you'd do, on the day you said you'd do it. Get known for one thing you're reliably good at. Name the drawbacks of your own idea before someone else finds them. Volunteer to write the document nobody wants to write, because the person holding the pen shapes what gets decided. That reputation is what makes a WIIFM land, and it's built out of behavior rather than seniority. If you're unsure whether that's the piece you're missing, it's worth seeing [where your influence stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you spend more time on wording. ## How often do I have to repeat it before it sticks? More often than feels necessary. ERE and Vena Solutions both treat repetition as a requirement rather than polish: the benefit belongs in the announcement email, the team meeting, the project brief, and the follow-up, because a point made once at a kickoff does not survive a busy week. The same logic explains why WIIFM turns up in learning design. Growth Engineering treats it as a precondition for training to land at all — a learner who hasn't been given a reason the material matters to them never gives it attention in the first place. Attention is simply the thing being earned, and it has to be re-earned each time you ask. Following up isn't nagging. It's the part where agreement turns into something happening. ## The skills behind getting a yes Read back across those answers and the same few capabilities keep surfacing under different questions — not the wording of the pitch, but what sits underneath it. **Influence** is the skill this phrase belongs to. In this framework, understanding what's in it for the other person isn't a trick appended to a pitch; it's the first step of a three-part sequence — prepare, pitch, persist. Preparing is the research: who actually decides, how the decision gets made, what they stand to gain. Pitching is the delivery: establish rapport, keep it simple, name the drawbacks, take a small win when the full yes isn't available. Persisting is following through until something actually happens. Most people who report that WIIFM didn't work for them did the middle third only. **Communication** is what happens to the message on the way out. Knowing what someone values is inert until you say it in a form they can use: main point first, brief, direct, adapted to how that particular person takes in information. It also governs the channel — a request involving negotiation or sensitivity belongs in a conversation, while writing is for what the other person needs time or a record for. And listening properly isn't a courtesy here. It's how you find the WIIFM in the first place. **Working with Your Manager** is where most people get their first real practice, because the person whose yes you need most often is the one you report to. Managers carry their own targets, constraints, and pressure from above — which is exactly the raw material a WIIFM is built from. Treating the relationship as a partnership rather than a permissions queue, bringing options instead of problems, making your results visible before you need something: all of it changes what a request looks like from their side of the desk. None of the three is a fixed setting you were issued at birth; each is behavior you can practice on purpose. The **free** Work Skills Test shows you [where your three stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), along with the other nine in the set of twelve it measures — useful mainly because it tells you whether influence is genuinely your bottleneck or whether something upstream of it is. ## What this means for you Some of this will already be how you operate. If you've ever rewritten a message after realizing it was written entirely from your side of the desk, or held a request back until you'd delivered something first, you've been doing the underlying work without giving it a name. The rest is learnable in the ordinary way, by practicing on small requests where little is at stake — which is how everyone who's good at this got good at it. It doesn't require becoming a different kind of person. And it compounds: the more your work depends on people who don't report to you, the more getting a yes stops being a useful extra and starts being most of the job. You got far enough into this to ask how to find someone's WIIFM when they haven't told you. That's the step most people skip on their way to the pitch. ## See where your skills stand That leaves one question this article can't answer for you: where you're starting from. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills, and it takes about 7 minutes. It gives you an honest read across all twelve — including the influence, communication, and manager-relationship habits this article kept circling back to — so you can see which of them is doing the most to help or hold back the yeses you're trying to get. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, about 7 minutes, and it covers all twelve skills.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? What's in it for me (WIIFM) means framing your ask around what the other person gains. Here's what it means at work, how to find it, and how to stay honest. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Influence. It also relates to Communication, Working with Your Manager. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/whats-in-it-for-me/ Preferred summary: "What's in it for me (WIIFM) means framing your ask around what the other person gains. Here's what it means at work, how to find it, and how to stay honest." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.