Need and Want

I spent a long time confusing two words that look like cousins and behave like strangers. Need and want. We use them as if they take turns standing in for each other, and most days they're happy to. Then you sit across from a founder who runs a company of ninety people, who hasn't drawn a full breath since the Series A, who tells you in a flat voice that yes, of course, breathwork, marvellous, the team would love it, and who will then not book it. Not this quarter. Not next. And you realise the two words were never cousins at all.

He needs it. He'd tell you so himself, and he wouldn't be performing. The need is sitting right there on the desk between you, in the jaw that won't unclench and the calendar with no white in it. What he hasn't got is the wanting. The need is a fact about his body. The want is a decision about his life, and nobody, in the whole history of being talked at, has ever been argued into one of those.

This is the part of my job I find quietly funny, in the way the genuinely serious things tend to be funny if you hold them at the right distance. People imagine the trade is persuasion, the slow wearing-down, the clever line that flips a no. Mine isn't. If I have to talk a man into wanting his own well-being, something has already gone wrong, and it's usually me, getting there before he did. Ram Dass, who was a Harvard psychologist before he was anything more interesting, said the only thing he could do to help you was work on himself, and the only thing you could do to help him was work on yourself. He was being precise, not poetic. You cannot do the wanting for another person. You can only get out of the light.

So the work isn't to manufacture the want. It's to close the distance between a need he can already feel and a want he hasn't connected it to yet, and the honest way to do that is embarrassingly old-fashioned. You ask. You ask the question that lets him feel the actual cost of the thing he's been carrying, the people leaving, the version of himself his kids get on a Sunday, and then you do the hardest thing in sales, which is nothing. You wait. You let the silence be his, not yours. And more often than you'd credit, he arrives at the want on his own, out loud, slightly surprised to hear himself say it.

That's the whole craft, and there isn't a trick in it anywhere. We're not in the business of telling people what they want. We deal in something stranger and far more durable, which is helping them notice what was already true. They knew they needed it when they walked in. The most I ever do is hold the door while they work out, in their own time and their own words, that they wanted it too.

- Rafferty, Head of Sales