Wants vs Needs

Ask a customer why they chose a supplier and you will get a tidy list of reasons. Better support. Stronger reporting. More experience in our sector. The list is genuine and they believe every word of it. It is also, in large part, written after the decision was taken.

Needs get you onto the shortlist. Wants decide which name on the shortlist gets the work. Most owners sell hard on the first and never mention the second, then lose to a firm with a thinner specification and a higher price.

What the model says

A need is functional. It is the box that has to be ticked for you to be considered at all: capacity, compliance, delivery date, the right accreditation, a price within range. Fail a need and you are out. Meet it and you have earned the right to be compared against two other firms who also meet it.

A want is what the buyer actually gets out of the decision. An end to a recurring argument. Their weekends back. Looking competent in front of a board. Never having that particular phone call again. Wants are rarely stated on a tender document and they are almost always what tips the choice.

The sequence matters. The want fires first, usually well before anyone has finished reading the quotes. The decision follows. The list of rational reasons is assembled afterwards, because a decision has to be defensible to a co-director, a spouse, a board or simply to yourself.

This applies in business-to-business too

Owners accept all of this for consumers and reject it for their own market. "Our buyers are professionals purchasing on behalf of a company. They are rational."

They are people spending someone else's money, which makes the wants different, not absent. The dominant want in most business purchases is not gain, it is protection: not being the person who chose badly. Add to that the operations director who wants the complaints to stop, the finance director who wants a predictable number, and the owner who wants to stop being the only person who knows how anything works.

None of those appear on the specification. All of them decide.

A worked example

Illustrative arithmetic and an illustrative sequence, not a client. Take an engineering firm with fourteen staff buying a job-management system. The written requirement is clear: job costing, stock, integration with the accounts package, fifteen users, data migration.

Two suppliers meet every line of it. One quotes £19,500 including setup and training. The other quotes £24,000.

The cheaper supplier presents its specification, feature by feature, and it is genuinely good. The dearer supplier spends most of the first meeting asking questions, and gets to this: the managing director spends around three hours every Sunday evening pulling job numbers together because he is the only person who can, and his production manager rings him four or five times a day to ask things he could answer himself if the information were visible.

The second proposal opens with that. Not with a feature list. With the sentence that in ninety days the production manager answers his own questions from a screen, and Sunday evenings stop being work. The specification is still in there, in full, because it has to be. It is just no longer the argument.

The firm chose the £24,000 option. Ask the MD why and he will tell you it was the better integration and the stronger support, and he will mean it. Those are real differences. They are also the justification, and they were assembled after a decision that was made when somebody finally described his Sunday evenings back to him.

Note what the dearer supplier did not do. It did not invent a want, it did not flatter anybody, and it did not skip the specification. It found what was true and stopped hiding it under the feature list.

How to find the want

You cannot manufacture a want. You can only find the one that is already there, and it will not be in the first answer you get.

Three questions do most of the work. "What made you start looking now, rather than last year?" That surfaces the trigger, and the trigger is usually attached to the want. "If nothing changes, what does this look like in twelve months?" That makes the cost of inaction concrete. And "who else in the business will notice if this works?" That tells you whose problem it really is.

Then listen for the sentence with feeling in it. People change tone when they get to the real thing. That is the sentence to repeat back to them in your proposal, in their words, not yours.

How to apply it this week

1. Ring your last three customers and ask why they really bought. Push past the first answer, which will be the justification. The second and third answers are the wants, and they are what your marketing should be saying.
2. Rewrite one proposal. Open with the outcome in the customer's own words. Put the full specification in as evidence, not as the argument. Same document, opposite order.
3. Add two questions to your first meeting. Why now, and what happens if nothing changes. Then stop talking for longer than is comfortable.
4. Read your homepage's first screen. Count the sentences about what you do against the sentences about what changes for them. Most sites are entirely need and wonder why enquiries are all about price.
5. Separate the two in your pricing conversation. Value story first, justification second. If you lead with the justification you have invited a line-by-line comparison against the cheaper quote.
6. Brief whoever answers the phone. The first question a caller is asked shapes everything after it. "What are you looking for?" gets you a specification. "What's prompted the call?" gets you the want.

The mistake most owners make

Assuming that because they can list rational reasons for their own purchases, the reasons came first. Look at the last significant thing you bought for the business. The vehicle, the software, the premises, the hire. There is a specification behind it, and there is also a reason you actually did it that quarter rather than the previous one.

The second mistake is the opposite one. Some owners hear this model, throw out the specification and sell entirely on outcomes and feeling. That loses at the justification stage, because the person who wants it still has to defend the spend to someone who was not in the room. Wants win the decision. Needs let them keep it.

The third is the one that costs reputation. Deciding what a customer ought to want and pushing it. Wants are discovered, not assigned, and buyers can tell the difference between being understood and being handled.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how well could you state what your last five customers actually wanted, as opposed to what they specified?
• What does your best customer get from working with you that they would never write on a tender document?
• When you lose on price, what was the want you never uncovered?
• Does your marketing sell the specification or the outcome, and which one would your customers say?

This underpins the whole Sales & Marketing Engine. Selling on need alone reduces every conversation to a comparison, and comparisons are won by whoever is cheapest. Find the want and you are no longer in the same competition.