Getting smart at detecting
needs“The appliances and machines around us will soon remember us
individually and anticipate our needs.”
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Enterprise One to One
T
echnology is smart and is becoming ever more
intelligent at knowing and responding to, even
influencing, our individual needs. In a culture so infused
with technology, we had better get pretty smart at knowing our
clients’ needs. If we want to build lifelong relationships, either in
our personal lives or, as is becoming the expectation, in our
business lives, we need to learn how to read other people’s
styles and needs with ever-increasing sophistication.
The better able we are to detect needs, the better able we
are to present ourselves, our products, and our services in a
way that keeps our customers satisfied. Companies talk today
about doing much more than keeping customers satisfied—
they talk of customer delight. To delight our customers we
need to be able to “model” their thinking and behavior to
ensure that we appeal to what really matters to them. We not
only need to “read” these styles, we need to have the
flexibility to respond to them.
I recently decided that I would learn some Danish so that I could
open my next program in Denmark in the native language. I felt
that this would be respectful of the time that my delegates there
give to listening to me speak in English. I asked a Danish
delegate on a program I was running in England if he would
translate a passage I had prepared so that I could practice what