How to Identify a Customer’s Needs to Boost Sales | Top Tips

Understanding your customer to sell is an essential step in any marketing action. It is even the most important, because without knowing your target and its needs perfectly, it is impossible to present an appropriate solution. Aggressive commercial techniques, very little for you? You are right, they rarely guarantee a sustainable business and even less the loyalty of your buyers. In this article, we invite you to discover the best tips for identifying a customer’s needs to boost your sales in a few simple steps. The key words? Organization and listening.

Understand your customer to sell: put yourself in their shoes

It’s almost a truism, but it’s worth repeating: to know your client, you always have to put yourself in their shoes! Imagine that you are an e-merchant (this works for all activities). The first questions to ask yourself, being in the shoes of a prospect who discovers your website, are the following:

• Why am I on this site?
• What am I looking for?
• What are my needs?
• What am I afraid of if I buy this product?
• What are my goals?

The answers to these questions will allow you to better understand the prospects or customers who visit your site. Also take a look at what your competitors are offering. The analysis of customer opinions and comments on the Internet and social networks is a real mine of information. It helps to understand what pleased and displeased in order to adapt your offer and save precious time.

Organize an audit to discover your client

For a better understanding, nothing replaces the direct exchange with your prospect. Now is the time to plan and frame this phase as well as possible.

Identify customer needs to boost sales

Once the origin of the problem is known, you have defined the need. Indeed, this is the link between the client’s starting situation, i.e., point A, and his objective, i.e., point B.

To help you validate this information, it may be interesting to refer to human psychology tools. Thus, Maslow’s pyramid lists and ranks primary motivations and needs. Used for more than 50 years, ghostwriting services are still used today to understand your target market and what they are looking for.

Knowing what stage, the customer is at is essential to determine effective sales and marketing action.

Take into account the context of the exchange

Try to determine the best time and place for the client, whether face-to-face or remotely. Inform him of the duration of the appointment, in general the attention drops after an hour of interview.

Ask the right questions

Knowing what information to obtain and preparing the questions will ensure that you don’t forget anything. There are 7 points to address during an appointment or a discovery process:

1. 1. The context in which the client operates and how he perceives it;
   2. The problems he encounters and how he prioritizes them;
   3. His ambitions and dreams;
   4. The obstacles and brakes he feels in the realization of these ambitions;
   5. His needs and his understanding of them;
   6. Its resources (staff, budget, time, etc.);
   7. Its history, useful to explain its positioning today.

Another recognized method exists to assess the context of the client and his approach: the QQOQCP. That is to say: Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?

Keep Notes

During the interview, take notes, but not too many. Limit yourself to key data such as encrypted elements. Instead, focus on active listening and empathy.

You now have a good overview. However, this is not enough. Because there is a catch… Which one? Well, sometimes the customer doesn’t really know his need or doesn’t reveal it directly, voluntarily or not. Want to be effective and relevant? To achieve this, you have to dig deeper and master a few techniques of human psychology.

Diagnose the problem to define the basic needs

The task is not as simple as it seems. Before determining the need, it is therefore necessary to find the problem and detect the deep motivations of the customer. For this, there is for example a simple technique, that of the “5Ps” or the “5 Whys”. Invented by the Japanese industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno, this method is now applied in many fields to identify the root cause of a problem or a need. It consists of asking the question “why?” five times in a row. », the last answer revealing the origin of the problem.

Start by asking: why this?

The client responds: because that.

Go back to his explanation and again ask why.

Repeat the sequence until the fifth answer must be the cause of the problem or need. Dig into the information your interlocutor gives you and don’t take anything for granted. This does not show a lack of confidence in his statements, but validates the fact that this information is correct.

Always explain your approach and use tact during the questioning so as not to appear too intrusive.

Rephrase and validate information

Sometimes, our brain apprehends reality in an erroneous way, often by instinct or reflex. These are cognitive biases. Some can cause a bit of confusion when dealing with customers. For example, favoring information confirming preconceived ideas or hypotheses without considering the veracity of the latter. This is called confirmation bias.

Advice: during your interviews, do not trust your instincts and never tell yourself that you know the needs of your interlocutor. Because the reality could be very different from what you anticipate.

Propose a solution and give the benefits it brings to the customer

At this stage, you have determined the precise profile of the client, understood his problem and his need. You are now in a position to offer a suitable solution. Indeed, the exchange you had together created the essential link to gain his trust and convince him that your offer is the one he needs. Last recommendation: Pay attention to behavioral responses. Words aren’t everything. Non-verbal communication, through gestures and looks, often expresses part of the information and helps to better understand your client to sell!