Stop selling! Satisfy the Four Universal needs of Buyers, and They will buy!

The competencies of sales professionals are numerous but boil down to human interaction, communication and relationship building. You, as a sales professional, needs to establish rapport and build trust, to communicate effectively and to develop and maintain lasting relationships, if you are to succeed in the sales profession.

In order to build a long-term relationship, you as a sales professional, must first establish rapport. You need to know how to build rapport quickly so that you can gain the trust that is needed to ask questions and get answers. You need two basic communications skills - the skill of asking questions and listening to the responses. What is the point of asking questions if you are too busy thinking up other questions to ask and not listening?

At one time sales professionals were taught to follow the golden rule "Do onto others as you would like to have done onto yourself." That was a great rule to follow. Under the golden rule, and it is right to say, that to yourself, you are the most important person in the world and how your treat yourself is how you should also treat others.

However, over the years the golden rule has been replaced with the Platinum rule "Do onto others as they would like to have done onto themselves." The platinum rule takes on a different approach. What it is saying is that when you are with another person, treat them the way they would like to be treated, not the way you would want to be treated. Therefore, we have had to change our sales approach.

As a salesperson, when we meet with a prospect or a client, who is the most important person in the world? I hope you said the opposite of the golden rule and said the prospect or client. If so, great, because without a prospect or a client, you have absolutely no chance of selling them anything. Do you agree? I hope so.

So, if the prospect or client is the most important person in the world when it comes to sales and we are to follow the platinum rule, we best treat them the way they want to be treated. So, sales professionals need to understand the universal needs of buyers.

There are basically four universal needs that sales professionals must address to satisfy buyers. The first one is that buyers have a need to be understood. That means we must listen to them and question them to better understand them. The problem many sales people have is that they don't listen and worst yet, they don't question the answers they receive to get even more information. More to come on this in another article on questioning skills.

The second universal need is that buyers need to feel welcomed. How do you welcome people that come and visit you at home? Do you welcome prospects and clients the same way, even in their own premise?
Buyers have the need to feel important. How important do you make them feel in your presence? Showing interest by asking questions and taking notes is one way to do that.
They also have the need to feel comfortable. How can you make them more comfortable?