Needs Vs Wants

We’re taught, and I have taught about the importance of “Need Identification.” We sophisticated discovery questions focused on probing customer needs, understanding their requirements.

• “Do you need these capabilities in your CRM system?”
• “How important is it to have these features on this machine?”
• “What if your new financial system enabled you to do these things?”
• ……the list is endless……

When we are at our best, we deeply understand the customer business processes. We understand the challenges/problems they face. We understand the impact of those problems. We understand the consequences for doing nothing.

And we work with our customers to help them understand these things.

We do analysis, we provide assessments, analyses, business cases, justifications. These are accompanied by testimonials and case studies about how we help our customers address their needs.

We equip our customers with charts, data, analyses they can present to their management to gain approval.

And we seek to gain their confidence. Have they identified the right issues and their impacts? Have they properly assessed alternatives? Have they identified the risks both of doing nothing and of the change?

When we at our very best, this is what we do with our customers. We focus on their needs and how we help fulfill those needs.

And still, our customers struggle.

Something is missing.

They can’t articulate it. They can’t quantify it. But they struggle.

When they can’t resolve that, most of the time they do nothing. Sometimes they do something, but many exhibit regret.

What are we and our customers missing?

Despite how well we address their needs. Despite how much confidence we build in the solution they are considering.

Until we understand what the customer wants, we and they will struggle.

• We don’t want new CRM systems or anything else, though we may need them.
• We want to be able to do our jobs, with confidence. Knowing we will meet the expectations of our managers and others.
• We want to feel that we are doing the right things in the right way.
• We want to know that we are contributing to something.
• We want to be learning, developing, and growing in our jobs and our careers.
• We want to be able to get home to see our kids’ soccer games.
• We want some sort of security that we are doing something meaningful and will continue to do so.
• We want to know that we matter.

What we want changes. What we want is personal. What we want is sometimes more of a feeling, something that we can’t always articulate. What we want is not about arriving at consensus.

Our tools and technologies don’t help us understand what people want.

AI can’t tell us what people want.

We only learn about what people want, when we connect with those people. And that takes people.

And once we understand what people want, then we can also begin to learn about what they desire…….