Mr. Ziglar was truly one of the greats. Even after his passing, I think this man continues to touch more lives and help more people in a day than most of us do in a lifetime.
In Business:
First, it’s about knowing your customer. Smart businesses now create a “customer avatar,” which is a fictitious person that embodies all the qualities of their ideal buyer.
Assign them a name, age, income level, hobbies, likes, dislikes — all the demographic and psychographic details. Once you have that, you can go about discovering their wants and designing products to satisfy them.
Second, you’ll notice Mr. Ziglar said to help people get “what they want” and not “what they need.” This is an important distinction.
Selling to “wants” is always preferable to selling to “needs.” It could make or break your business.
Let’s say you were walking around a mall and you saw the vast majority of people were overweight. You might say, “What this place needs is a weight-loss clinic.”
You may, in fact, be right. But what they want is a really good ice cream shop.
In Life:
What do people want, in general, when they’re around you? Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: it really doesn’t involve you at all.
At the risk of sounding harsh, people couldn’t care less about you. What they really care about is how they feel about themselves when they’re around you.
That doesn’t mean you should go around offering a bunch of insincere compliments, like Eddie Haskel on Leave It to Beaver.
What it usually means is treating people with respect, being engaging, and being a good listener. They want to feel like their opinions actually matter to you.
Hopefully, their opinions do matter to you. Otherwise, why are you even hanging out with them?
So remember…
You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
— Zig Ziglar