The very first foundational principle of 80/20 marketing and selling is: Seek First to Understand…and I’ll add: with a Servitude Heart.
Until you completely understand what your market as a whole or individual customer wants you can’t help them.
Almost 100 years ago, Dale Carnegie taught us that selling and persuasion was as simple as finding out what people want and then give it to them.
Simple back then but so much today. Why?
Because it is extremely difficult for most people to articulate what they want, so today you have to become a little bit counterintuitive in your methods, an expert at asking the right questions, of the right people, at the right time.
There are two questions everyone can answer accurately:
- What they don’t want, and…
- Questions about their past behaviors.
When it comes to figuring out what their market wants, most business owners and sales people make the same costly mistake: They either assume they know or they simply ask people what they want and then sit back and think they’ll tell them and then wait for the money to roll in.
Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’”.
And Steve Jobs said “A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
So, if you want to know what your market wants, stop asking them…or at least you have stop asking them directly.
Being an 80/20 marketer and seller is a lot like being a doctor.
There are five stages: Discovery, Diagnose, Prescribe, Create and Implement.
The first stage is the Discovery stage.
Think about the last time you visited your doctor’s office. When I check in the first question they ask me is “Have you traveled outside of the country in the last 6 months.”
That’s the beginning of getting to know me.
Once I sit down with my doctor, he’ll start asking me questions about what are the symptoms that motivated me to come see him, when did they start, under what circumstances do they occur, how often, etc. etc..
As an 80/20 marketer or sales person, the better I know my market, their pain points, their motivation, what “language” do they speak… I’m not talking about English or Spanish or Croatian…, I’m talking about how to I speak to them so they understand and can wrap their head around what I’m saying. When I truly know them like a friend, the better I’m going to be able to help them get what they want.
I first learned this truth 30 years ago when I was selling cars.
It helped take me from a 10 car a month salesman to a 25-30 car a month salesman.
The most effective questions were the ones I asked about what they didn’t like about their current vehicle and how the way they used their vehicle in the past no longer was suitable today.
The salespeople I trained in this method and implemented it, also dramatically improved their sales.
So if you want to know what your market wants and get better at selling more, you have to become counterintuitive and find out what they don’t like and extrapolate from there.