"Nothing has more strength than dire necessity." ~ Euripides
In sales and marketing, the most basic strategy is an ability to fulfill a need. How can we use this strategy to persuade affluent clients? After all, they seemingly have no needs? Wrong. Everybody needs something. Determining what that something is and if you're able to fulfill it is the process of criteria elicitation.
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 part of the brain responsible for consciousness is the Reticular Activating System. It is thought to be the center of motivation and arousal and is involved in most of the central nervous system's activity (including sleep and wakefulness). The reticular activating system is what helps us pay attention to things that we need to pay attention to and put away those things we can afford to disregard.
Studies have shown that the conscious mind can hold about seven bits of information at any given point in time.
Think about the last time you took a long road trip. Maybe you had on the radio, you were singing along to an old song (whose lyrics you still remember from decades ago, but hadn't thought about consciously in years, maybe), and you're maybe thinking about where you're going, who you're going to see when you get there. You probably aren't thinking of having to go to the bathroom. You won't think about that until you need to. And maybe you aren't thinking about water or gas or food, unless you need them.
But once you need any of these, they become extremely important and they are part of your conscious thought processes until the need has been satisfied. All of the sudden, it doesn't matter what's on the stereo or what the scenery looks like. All that matters are the road signs telling us what's available to eat, where the next gas station is, etc.
Why don't we have to contend with these needs all the time? Because they aren't relevant all the time. We can safely store them in our other-than-conscious until we require them, until they are again relevant.
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.
Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies 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 strategies. Get your own completely unique content version of this article.
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