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Persuasion Based On Your Prospect's Needs
"Nothing has more strength than dire necessity." ~ Euripides
“Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” ~ Euripides
One of the most basic strategies in sales and marketing is fulfilling a need. You always want to feed a hungry crowd. Every crowd has a different hunger, so how do you know who wants what? And how do you use this strategy to persuade your affluent prospects?
Think about what is consciously on your mind. You’re reading this article, so it’s possible these words are all that you’re thinking about. But if I was writing an article about bananas, then you’d start picturing a banana, or thinking about bananas. If your doctor told you you had to start eating bananas or potassium, you’d probably think about them even more.
We do not, nor could we, think about bananas twenty-four hours a day. But necessity (i.e. a doctor’s advice for your health) can bring them to the forefront more often than normal.
The part of the brain responsible for consciousness is the Reticular Activating System. It is thought to be the center of motivation and arousal and is involved in most of the central nervous system’s activity (including sleep and wakefulness). The reticular activating system is what helps us pay attention to things that we need to pay attention to and put away those things we can afford to disregard.
Studies have shown that the conscious mind can hold about seven bits of information at any given point in time.
Say you’re on a road trip. You’re driving along looking at the scenery. It passes in and out of your consciousness. Maybe you’re thinking about where you are going, what you’re going to do when you get there. Maybe you’re on the cell phone and you’re thinking of what the other person speaking is saying. You’re not thinking about water, unless you’re really thirsty. You’re not thinking about gas, unless you’re running low. You don’t think about these things because of the limited space in your conscious mind.
When you start needing something, however, like gas, or water, or food, all of the sudden that’s what you’re thinking about consciously. You start really paying attention to the road signs and billboards for restaurants. You calculate whether you’re going to be able to make it to the next gas station before running out of gas. Need.
What happened to those thoughts before? Well, they really weren’t in our consciousness. Once these thoughts begin to hold relevancy we can seize control of them and leverage them to our advantage, then put them away when they’re no longer applicable to us.
By eliciting the criteria of our prospects, we bring their needs to the forefront. As we speak to their values, in relation to our products or services, we are fine tuning the reticular activating system to everyone’s advantage—ours and theirs.
Criteria elicitation is our compass in satisfying our prospect’s and client’s needs. Once we have that, the persuasion naturally follows.