Weekly Sales Tips: Understanding Customer Needs Through Customer Motivation

There’s nothing more important in all of sales than understanding customer needs. We’re going to look at understanding customer needs and understanding that important motivation.

Let’s say someone is thinking about moving. If you’re a sales professional in the real estate business, no other question comes close to a level of importance than understanding why somebody is moving in the first place. In fact, everything that we learn about the customer stems from one question.

Finding Their Why

Too many salespeople are hung up on, “What?” They want to know what the customer is looking for. They want to learn about price range and timeframe. Those are all “what” questions. Good to know, not where you want to start. When it comes to understanding your customer’s motivation, it’s not about what the customer is moving to, it’s about what the customer’s moving from. This helps us to understand our customer’s needs. Why are they thinking about moving in the first place?

No One Said Moving was Easy

When someone wants to uproot their family and move to another town, city, or state, there’s a lot of trauma involved. There’s the process of moving. There’s the selling of their home, finding the new schools, communicating with the kids, trying to decide what we’re going to buy and what we’re gonna compromise on. What do we do with the home that we have right now? Let’s not even get started in a conversation like how difficult is it to pack your garage? Pack my garage? I’d rather have a root canal. Not just your garage, how about your entire home? When you think about it, selling a home and moving is a very difficult thing to do.

So why would people do it? Because there’s something so significantly wrong in their life that it has to be remedied. It has to be fixed. And somehow that fix involves uprooting their life and replanting it somewhere else. That issue is what fuels the customer’s motivation.

The Difference in Motivation

When you think about the motivation, about that motivating factor, your questioning skills have to get you to those deeper levels. It’s the only way to truly understand the need that your customer has. Now I say this because most customers do not walk through the door with their motivation laid out neatly for you to be fully identified.

When I ask a customer, why are you thinking about moving? The first response is not a deep response. The first response is probably something like, well, we’re renting right now. That’s not their motivation. That’s simply their living status. So we need to be prepared to go deeper on that and figure out what is really going on.

Let me be clear, when we talk about understanding the customer’s needs, we’re trying to figure out why they are moving in the first place. What is motivating them to make this decision? However, we want to make sure it’s a question that is easy to answer. Too many salespeople think they’re asking a motivation question when they ask, say, “What brought you out today?” That’s not a motivation question. The motivation question has to get to the core of why they are moving in the first place. So my suggestion is that you keep this simple.

Your Motivation Question

When I ask the motivation question, it’s very straightforward. So tell me why you’re thinking about moving in the first place. That’s it. I ask simply, I ask conversationally, but I tell you that on almost 100% of the cases you’re gonna have to dive deeper. You’re gonna have to follow that up with some version of, tell me more.

Again, most customers do not elaborate on their motivation right out of the gate. It requires some digging, it takes some probing, but it makes a huge difference when you start to understand the depth of the customer’s needs. Here’s how this sounds.

Me: Why are you thinking about moving?
Customer: Well, we’re renting right now.

Me: Tell me more. (going deeper). What is it about renting that’s not working for you?
Customer: Well, the place we’re in right now is kind of loud.

Me: Oh, well, how so? (another version of, tell me more)
Customer: Well, we’re in an apartment and we’ve got these kids upstairs and they just run all the time. They’re running, just pounding day and night. They’re just constantly pounding on the floor.  It’s driving us absolutely crazy.

Now the key here is you don’t fully understand the motivation until you understand it on an emotional level. You see there is some level of emotional frustration your customer is feeling and until you hear that customer share some of that frustration you don’t really know their motivation.

This week, I really want you to lean into that motivation question and the tell me more that comes behind it. Understanding the customer’s needs is at the core of serving them. If you get this right, everything falls into place. If you get this wrong, it’s gonna be a short career.

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Until next time my friends, learn more, to earn more.