We couldn’t agree more with all the sales manuals that state that to sell, you need to detect the customers’ needs, and additionally, at Optimum Sales, we believe that in personal selling, you need to make the customer verbalize their needs and get them to accept that they have those needs.
To this universal rule, we want to take a step further and delve into the different types of needs that a customer has with the aim of providing tools to enhance the sales skills of the salespeople and enable them to move away from markets where price is a decision driver. At Optimum Ventas, we consider that customers have three types of needs, which we have differentiated by levels of depth:
- First-level needs.
- Second-level needs.
- Third-level needs.
How to identify the three levels of customer needs?
First-level needs are those that respond to a basic requirement. For example, a first-level need for a frozen food manufacturer could be: “I need to transport my products.”
Second-level needs are those that are an additional requirement for the proper development of the customer’s activity. Using the same example from the previous point, the second-level need for this frozen products manufacturer would be: “I need to deliver my products in a way that they do not suffer any deterioration due to temperature changes in the cold chain from the factory to my customer’s table.”
Third-level needs are those that the client has to carry out the strategic development of their company. In the example of the frozen food manufacturer, it could be “We want to develop a new line of frozen products and home delivery.”
Being able to detect the first, second, and third level needs, and argue that our product or solution meets the three levels of our customers’ needs, positions us as a partner that advances their business, and allows us to reposition the price of our products and solutions, as the customer perceives that they are receiving something more from us than from our competitors and, in general, is willing to pay a bit more for our value delivery than for that of our competitors.
The salesperson who acquires the ability to sell based on the customer’s third-level needs is able to sell more and, above all, at a better price!!!
| David Galve | General Director www.linkedin.com/in/davidgalve |  |
