In business, you don’t need a psychology degree.

But you do need to understand the thinking, feelings, and decision making process of your customers.

And that is the hardest part of marketing a business.

You can create marketing campaigns and rank well for SEO.  You can design a beautiful website.  You may have tons of followers on you social media channels.

You can develop a product to deliver.  You can manage the production, quality control, inventory and shipping.

You can hire the right team.  Everybody’s ambitious, detail oriented, and honest.

None of this is the hard part.

The hard part is having a complete understanding of the demand:

• What do your customers want?
• What do they need?
• What will motivate them to buy from you?
• What concerns or objections do they have?
• What causes hesitation or delay?  How can you overcome this?

The crux of a successful business offering is meeting a real demand from an understood target audience.  It’s much more difficult than creating any marketing collateral on your side, and is in fact it’s more difficult than coming ups with something you feel you’d like to supply.

Perhaps the biggest mistakes start-ups make is that they get caught-up on the wrong side of this equation.  They focus on their assets and supply, without a distinct, evidence-based view of what demand they are fulfilling.

But supply without demand isn’t a model for success.  Furthermore, realize that people don’t buy what they need, they buy what they want.  The understanding you have of your customers is based knowing the emotional triggers that motivate them to take action.  Without that, you’ll end-up with a bunch of people who think you idea is “great” but never actually buy.

There are a lot of nuts and bolts that go into this, of course.  But this is the big picture.  Know the demand you’re supplying, and you’re in business.  Don’t know it and you won’t be.