Persuasion Based On Your Prospect's Needs

"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?

What are you thinking about right now? Maybe the words on the screen, maybe just the sentences as you read them. You're probably not thinking about bananas. Well. . .now you are, but you weren't before I brought them up. Right? But if your doctor told you that you needed to eat one banana a day to help with your potassium levels, you might think about bananas more often.

There's no possible reason for us to be thinking about bananas all day and dreaming about them all night. But when necessity, such as your doctor's advice, intervenes, then bananas become more of a common thought for us.

Consciousness is regulated by the part of the brain called the reticular activating system. This is considered to be central to motivation and arousal. It's involved in the central nervous system's activities and it helps us to pay attention to the most important things and store those we can reasonably disregard for a time.

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.

But once you need any of these, they become extremely important and they are part of your conscious thought processes until the need has been satisfied. All of the sudden, it doesn't matter what's on the stereo or what the scenery looks like. All that matters are the road signs telling us what's available to eat, where the next gas station is, etc.

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to hold relevancy we can seize control of them and leverage them to our advantage, then put them away when they're no longer applicable to us.

Your prospect's values and criteria are their needs. By eliciting their criteria, we can illuminate their needs for them, especially in relation to our products or services. By speaking to this higher level (or deeper level) we are fine tuning their reticular activating system to our advantage. And as we work with full integrity, this turns out to be to their advantage as well.

Criteria elicitation is our compass in satisfying our prospect's and client's needs. Once we have that, the persuasion naturally follows.

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.

Please Rate this Article

Not yet Rated