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The Power of Need: Persuading Utilizing 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?

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.

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.

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.

Researchers have shown that our conscious minds can hold approximately seven bits of information at any given time.

Think about the last time you took a long road trip. Maybe you had on the radio, you were singing along to an old song (whose lyrics you still remember from decades ago, but hadn't thought about consciously in years, maybe), and you're maybe thinking about where you're going, who you're going to see when you get there. You probably aren't thinking of having to go to the bathroom. You won't think about that until you need to. And maybe you aren't thinking about water or gas or food, unless you need them.

It becomes a different story when you all of the sudden need one of them. Gas becomes so very important if you're on Empty. Water becomes important if you're dehydrated and your A/C isn't working. When food becomes a need, all of the sudden you start seeing fast food signs telling you what's available to eat, when before you may not have been paying more than a slight passing attention to them.

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 (finding the very deepest desires of your prospect) is crucial to pointing us in the right direction to satisfy those needs. Once you know the direction to take a person, persuading him/her will come naturally.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques 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 techniques. This article is available as a unique content article with free reprint rights.

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