Selling to Business Tips: Feed the Need

Visualize this: somewhere people will lose sleep tonight because they don’t have what you sell. They have an unfilled need that is urgent (that is, there’s a hard deadline), compelling (there are significant consequences of not filling the need), and unsolved (they don’t have a solution that works).
These are the Big Three of needs: talk to someone who only has two of the three and you’ll get head nodding and polite—but limited—attention. What you probably won’t get is the sale. It takes all three at once: compelling and unsolved, but no deadline? Mañana, baby. Urgent and unsolved, but no consequences? No rush to get this one done either. Compelling and urgent, but a solution (albeit not as elegant as yours) exists? Sorry, I’ve got more pressing issues to deal with.
Find the people who have a critical need that you can solve and you’ll get their full attention. But how do you find them? One effective approach is to define the characteristics of companies that indicate they might have the problem you solve. Once you’ve defined the qualifying characteristics, you can quickly create a list of companies who fit your criteria, then go ask if they have that particular problem. You might be surprised at the results.