5 Steps to Know What Your Customer Needs -How to Sell without Selling Part 3

Do you really know what your customer needs?

Knowing what your customer needs is critical to any successful business deal, whether online or offline. You will only buy something with a need for the product or service.

“Wait a moment, Jan! I have bought stuff I really don’t need.”

I can almost hear you scream this out to undermine my argument that there will be no deal without knowing what your customer needs.

However, needs can have many different aspects. When you are thirsty, you drink water. When you are hungry, you eat food.

These two examples represent the basic survival needs. But when buying water, you choose one brand among various alternatives, and the same goes for food.

What is driving you to choose one particular brand?

Here, the more analytical part of needs differs from person to person.

If you missed “How to sell without selling part 1,” catch up here. Part 2 was published exclusively on YouTube three days later. You will learn the difference between features and benefits and how they play together. Watch the video here.

How to Know What Your Customer Really Needs?

In this first step of a professional commercial relationship, we are not trying to sell anything to a potential customer. Instead, the correct way to go is to find a way to help the customer to make an intelligent purchase.

If a pushy sales strategy is applied, in most cases, the customer will regret the purchases and try to return the product and get a refund of what has been paid. All serious, online businesses offer a money-back guarantee today if the customer isn’t happy with the product or service. So, we will all be winners if the customer is satisfied from the very beginning.

The path to happy customers is to help them to make correct purchase decisions. The gateway to a happy customer is to know what your customer needs. And how do we know that? ASK!

In my career as a vacuum cleaner rep, I learned that there are five questions to cover before you know what your customer needs. The order of the five questions could vary depending on the conversation.

Let me show how I managed these questions when promoting vacuum cleaners.

Who?

To quickly get to know if I’m talking to the right person, one of my initial questions would be:

“Who is responsible for the cleaning in your nice home?”

In other words, am I talking to a potential decision-maker?

It’s like a broad helicopter view to determine if I’m “fishing in the correct lake.”

How?

The next step is to determine how the cleaning is executed. Does a vacuum cleaner already exist as a cleaning tool, or is the cleaning process made differently?

This question is important to dive deeper into, to know as much as possible about the customer’s routines and habits.

What?

What is the most important to keep clean? Is it the big carpet in the living room or the mattresses in the sleeping area? Maybe any of the family members are suffering from allergies.

At this point in the conversation, the engagement should be more active. A series of answers will be delivered by “provoking” the potential customer with different follow-up questions.

Step by step, I get an exciting scanning of the customer’s cleaning behavior.

When?

When is the customer cleaning his or her home?

Once a week or daily?

These questions could also be extended in many different directions, and by connecting back to the previous questions, an exciting dialogue is now in full swing.

It’s crucial to not start any argumentation but to let the customer freely expose how the cleaning process takes place.

Why?

If the questions so far have been pronounced correctly, I should have quite a clear picture of the potential customer’s needs when it comes to cleaning the home.

The last and perhaps the most provoking question could induce the customer to define in his or her own words the real needs of a vacuum cleaner.

“Why is it important to keep your carpet, mattress (or whatever the customer has indicated before) clean?”

What would be your response to such a question?

Your Customer Needs for a Successful Online Business

How do you use this “vacuum-cleaner approach” in the online world? This might be a very valid question. The answer would be:

Exactly the same, but reverse!

When doing business online, you don’t start with a potential customer in front of you whom you can bombard with a lot of questions. The need analysis must be there, but instead of asking, you have to construct an ideal customer need and target those persons in your marketing campaigns.

This reverse needs analysis you can make by constructing an avatar for the group of people you would like to focus on.

Watch the video and see how to cover the five words who, how, what, when, and why when creating your customer avatar.

These are the links to the page mentioned in the video:

https://tvdmexonline.com/LaunchYou12224

https://tvdmexonline.com/ModernWealthy12224

Here are the links to the two previous videos in this series of “How to sell without selling.”

Part 1: https://youtu.be/DFYLtVo6C5k

Part 2: https://youtu.be/0g1POZZbUVA

5-step formula for professional sales (without selling)

In this “How to sell without selling” session, we have gone through the first step out of 5.

D – definition of needs

Before the fourth part in this series and the second step in my professional formula for sales (without selling), speed up your process by getting your ModernWealthy training. You will nurture what you have learned so far, and it will let you progress faster.