Many people have heard the clever Harvard generated sales idea that a person that is shopping for a drill doesn’t really want a drill, they want a hole. A good sales person therefore gets to know the hole the person wants so they can sell them the drill they need.
If the guy in this picture had come to you to tell you he needed a drill what would you have sold him?
The drill or hole story may be a bit of a cliche now, but I can tell you that some of the biggest mistakes I have made in business is when I have confused “need” and “want” and certainly the greatest successes I have had is when I have understood the difference very clearly.
I was once a smoker. I always knew I really needed to quit smoking. I felt that need to varying degrees depending on how disgusted I was that I was still smoking. I only walked away from smoking permanently when I wanted to.
So what has this got to do with a home based business? Well almost always, someone is encouraged to join a home based business, they are told “everyone needs this product”!, “how many people need to lose weight”?, “you need this product every day, don’t you”? or some variation on that theme.
I’m going to flat out tell you that in almost all cases, that need doesn’t matter one bit. If you focus on what people need rather than really want then it will be almost impossible to be successful with a home based business or any business.
Let’s look at some examples that have happened to me, so you can see what I mean.
I built a nutritional h
ome business with great products. One of those products had a huge positive impact on my blood pressure – made it normal with no meds so even my Doctor signed off on it. I thought I had struck gold! Everyone surely knows many people that need something for their blood pressure! They surely really need something natural and not meds don’t they?
Well whether they needed the product or not, I couldn’t retail it because it was $80 to $160 per months for meaningful results. I got told many times “that looks great but I can get meds on copay for $10/month, guess I’ll stick with them”. In short, almost no one wanted to pay the price and almost no one wanted to refer others so they got the product cheaper. They didn’t want it enough to overcome either cost or effort. Focusing on their need was a complete waste of my time, energy, and expense.
I got into business with wireless and again I thought it was an easy path to gold! Everybody needs wireless! People will jump all over the program to refer three others to get their wireless service for free right?! Well no actually they won’t! People don’t want to make the effort to refer others. They want to be able to go to a brick and mortar wireless store, not just deal online and by phone. Not so easy then is it?
Well when you focus on what people want it really does become much, much easier.
People are looking to make money when they join a home based business. Period. That may well coincide with their 
need to lose weight, save money on wireless, look younger or other “need” but their want is to increase income to serve other wants like less stress, more time freedom, retirement security and so on.
Focusing on what people want then will help you enormously in business. Learn to think much less about what people “need”.
When we were developing the Professional Home Business Academy, we knew that people desperately needed skills training and education to help them stack the odds of success in their favor. Thankfully our experience also meant that we knew that we needed to understand “want” rather than “need”. Our studies showed that people not only needed skills training, but wanted it based on the average spend of $5K to $7K per year on skills training. Our experience also allowed us to realise that people wanted that education in a straightforward form at a low price point.
We also knew that people want to be in positive cashflow immediately while they learned the skills and definitely did not want to go financially backwards to achieve that. If we had focused on the desperate need for skills training and priced the training high, people wouldn’t want it enough. We made it easy for people to earn wile they were learning, because we know people want to be in profit.
The PHB Academy has been an immediate hit then because of our focus on what people want. As you build any business, keep your focus 100% on want rather than need. Sometimes they will coincide, but in almost every case, want is far more important than need.
Perhaps the Professional Home Business Academy is something you need, but to see if it’s something you want then a good starting point is here:
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