Need: Persuading Prospects Based On Their Deep Values

"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?

If you stop to think about what you are consciously thinking about right now it might be the words that you're reading. You're probably not thinking about peeling a banana, or you weren't until you just read 'peeling a banana'. If your doctor told you to eat a banana every day for potassium, you might think about bananas more than the average person, certainly less than a banana farmer, but more than average.

And unless we were involved in the growing and harvesting of bananas for a living, there would be really no use for us to think about them too very often, though when a doctor advises you to eat one a day, you're going to have them in the conscious part of your mind more often.

The reticular activating system is the part of the brain responsible for regulating our consciousness. It's central to motivation and arousal and is involved in the central nervous system's activities. The reticular activating system helps us to pay attention to what is most important and disregard what is not at the moment needed.

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.

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.myaddirectory.com

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.

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