How to Conduct a Needs Assessment

Whether conducted in-person, in a virtual meeting or over the phone, a needs assessment is a critical part of the sales process. Asking the right questions when talking to a potential customer can help you better understand their needs and help open their eyes to why your product of service will be beneficial in helping their organization flourish.

Conducting a successful needs assessment can be tricky, though. Knowing which questions to ask, when to ask them and getting the customer to give you the right kinds of answers are key to truly comprehending your potential client’s needs. Without a well-rounded understanding, you won’t be able to deliver the most effective solutions available, and your sales may suffer as a result.

What is a needs assessment?

In short, a needs assessment is something that helps determine what a company or organization needs in order to function as effectively as possible. The assessment helps identify the areas that might be holding a company back from performing how it wants or needs to be. A company cannot move forward if it does not know what it needs to change or how it can change it, which is why you’re leading the conversation: you hold the answers.

Due to the depth of information you require from the customer, doing a needs assessment may seem complicated. However, at its core, a needs assessment is simply a conversation in which you work toward reaching a greater understanding of your potential customer.

There are a few key things you’ll want to uncover during this conversation:

• Who the customer is
• What the customer’s pain points or challenges are
• How your product or service can help alleviate those challenges
• What the customer thinks about your potential products and services as they apply to their organizational challenges

Your ultimate goal with a needs assessment is to help your customer recognize and address their challenges and provide them with solutions.

Steps to delivering the best needs assessment possible

Just because a needs assessment is a conversation doesn’t mean it can’t go horribly awry if you’re not careful. You’ll want to lead the conversation in a specific way in order to gain the best results: the customer purchasing your product or service.

Follow these steps to conduct an in-depth needs assessment with your potential customers.

1. Do your research: The first part of a needs assessment comes before you ever pick up the phone or meet with the client—research. You’ll need to gather as large of an understanding of the client’s company or organization as you can before talking to them. This way, you show the client you are invested in helping their organization and are not there to waste their time asking meaningless questions. In-depth research also helps keep your sales calls shorter and more efficient in a world where time is already so limited.

2. Ask meaningful questions: When it is time to meet with the client or give them a call, be prepared with a list of meaningful, open-ended questions that will help you reach the level of understanding you require. These questions should explore both the good and bad about the company, what growth the client expects, what their goals are and what challenges they face.

Start by asking questions about the company’s background to supplement your research and get answers to questions you couldn’t find on your own. This shows the client you are informed and warms them up before the more difficult conversation to come.

Then, move on to questions about the company’s challenges. Inquire what these challenges are, when they occur most, when they began and which are most important. This is the truly important part of your needs assessment, so don’t move on until you have the answers you need.

Finally, ask about the urgency of these challenges and how much difficulty the company experiences as a result. Frame these questions in terms of metrics your client will find important, like time, cost and output. These questions deepen your understanding and help the client realize just how urgent the problems are and if they require a solution soon.

3. Present a solution: When you feel like you truly understand the company’s challenges, identify a solution your company offers that can help solve these challenges. However, you don’t want to pitch to them just yet.

Frame these solutions with more questions. Ask the client how a solution that does what your product or service does could help their organization fix its challenges, and how quickly this type of solution would need to be implemented. This way, you’re still gaining valuable information about the customer’s buying behavior and getting an idea about their needs as they relate to your products or services.

Top things to consider during needs assessments

Conducting a needs assessment doesn’t have to be difficult, but you must remember your ultimate goal: to get to the bottom of your potential client’s problems. A common issue sales representatives face is that the answers the customer gives actually point toward symptoms of a problem, rather than to the problem itself. You’ll need to ask the right combination of questions and think critically to really deduce what the customer’s problem is in order to deliver a solution that will actually work.

Additionally, gaining information is important, but most business executives will not be willing to give you much time out of their day. This means your calls or meetings need to be quick and effective, requiring a lot of preparation ahead of time.

Learn as much as you can about the company or organization in question before ever picking up the phone. Also, make sure you ask questions that will not waste your potential client’s time but will help you get a more well-rounded look at the company and its needs. Always ask open-ended questions. Yes-or-no questions will usually garner yes-or-no answers and severely limit the amount of information you stand to gain from the potential customer.

Finally, try to avoid making your needs assessment call seem like an interrogation. Keep the conversation light while getting the information you need. Don’t be pushy with your products; this is, first and foremost, about the customer.

With the right combination of research, questioning and linking challenges to solutions, you’ll be able to frame your product or service in a way that shows the client that your company is what it needs to reach success.