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Of the various steps in the selling process, the most important is identifying the needs of customers or prospects. No single part of the process deserves more of your attention and study. Your ability to discover and interpret the needs of others is vital to your success. Careful! Don’t brush this off as an elaboration on the obvious. Human needs, complex as they can be, are the motivators of all human behavior. You can’t know too much about this subject. A few minutes of reading here will reveal essentials of the needs mechanisms. This will help you immeasurably in your sales tasks — starting now.
To visualize the needs and drives residing in any person’s mind, imagine a static collection of discrete thoughts and ideas stored conveniently in one place, each independent of the others and ready to come into play as required. An analogy might be a workshop full of tools, each having a specific nature and use but not having much relationship to one another. Except that they share the common denominator of tools, the hammer is not related to the saw or the saw to the pliers, and so on. Nor does one tool influence the shape, size, value, function, or importance of the others. When you need a screwdriver, nothing else will do. Each tool does its unchanging thing when called upon, period. When the screwdriver is in use, the value of the hammer remains unchanged, although it may not be needed at that moment. Unfortunately, the collection of needs residing in our minds does not operate in this fashion.
Instead, visualize needs and drives as a dynamic, interrelated, and intertwined collection of thoughts, ideas, and motivations that direct our decisions and actions. These are in constant flux, moving up and down the scale of priorities, each changing in value and each influencing the value and importance of all the others. A given need may grow to occupy space left by another, or it may diminish in importance and value to make room for another whose moment has come. One need may be the top priority now with fulfillment in progress. Suddenly something changes and everything stops. Fulfillment efforts are instantly postponed or canceled. A new need reaches ascendancy and displaces the old. The person’s focus changes and he or she reorders all other needs in terms of their current value and importance. When a need is satisfied, refocusing and reordering occur again. Our task then is to deal with a complex, ever-changing matrix of needs. Identifying and defining needs is our next task.
Conscious Needs and Basic Needs
As a first cut, we can divide the whole body of needs into two main groups: conscious needs and basic needs. One way to distinguish between them is by the way we treat them (or by the way they treat us).
Conscious needs are usually talked about, written about, and discussed openly and freely by those involved. People talk about their need for housing, new clothes, cosmetics, vacations, getting a degree or a boat or a car, cutting costs, improving product quality or profitability or market share, and so on. Conscious needs change frequently, depending upon the issues at hand and the priority of the moment.
Basic needs never change. They are innate and identical for all human beings. Basic needs are our psychological underpinnings. They are not usually talked about, written about, or discussed openly and freely by the people involved. People almost never talk about their own need for self-esteem, for freedom from fear, for love, strength, adequacy, status, and so on. Such needs are highly personal, very private, and deeply seated. In fact, most people are not fully aware of their basic needs, but they do respond to them promptly and specifically.
Conscious needs are always manifestations of basic needs. They are inseparable in one sense. They reside in the same person, and they work together. For an analogy, think of a flowering plant. Conscious needs are visible, clear, and out in the open like the blossoms, leaves, and stems. We talk about them openly. Basic needs are the root systems below ground and out of sight. We seldom talk about them, although they support the plant physically, feed it, and govern its behavior. Conscious needs are the surface indicators of what is really happening within the person. For example, you probably know people who have bought a certain make of luxury automobile not for its features but for the status it conferred. As these people talk openly of safety, reliability, comfort, and durability, they silently feed their self-esteem with the status value they believe such cars offer.
Most persuasion tasks involve conscious needs rather than the basic needs that prompt them, because these are the things we can talk about. We can usually take conscious needs at their face value and succeed with persuasion efforts based on these alone. There are times, however, when we are stopped by an objection, obstruction, rejection, or some other barrier. This is when we need our knowledge of basic needs, the root system below ground, to help us analyze and interpret the underlying causes, find solutions, and restore progress.
