Identifying customer needs: How to prioritize & act on what buyers want

For sales teams across every industry, keeping up with high customer expectations is a seemingly constant challenge. On top of executing their day-to-day sales activities, managing their pipeline, and ensuring they hit their targets, salespeople must also properly identify and solve for their customers’ needs, or risk falling behind their competitors.

Customers expect ease, convenience, and intuitive services and products. They also expect businesses to keep up with their expectations, regardless of the platform they use to interact with that business. But if sales organizations and their sellers don’t understand customers’ fundamental needs, they cannot offer the tailored solutions that meet and exceed those needs.

This shift is accelerating rapidly. Gartner's 2025 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey found that 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 69% report inconsistencies between website information and what sellers tell them. This means sales teams must identify customer needs accurately before any conversation happens, because buyers are forming opinions long before they engage with a rep.

A lack of foundational knowledge surrounding customer needs often leads sales teams on a wild goose chase in their attempts to offer solutions that adequately serve their customers. This means wasted time, resources, and, ultimately, missed revenue.

Here, we’ll walk through the process of identifying the most crucial aspects of customer needs and how to build upon them to craft sales strategies that pinpoint and solve consumer and prospect pain points.

What are customer needs?

Customer needs include all of the expectations, demands, and requirements (both specified and unspecified) a buyer has as they seek out a solution. In some instances, the customer may not even be fully aware of their own needs, so sellers must interact with each prospect and client with acute awareness of their potential expectations.

While each buyer is unique, and thus so are their needs, sales organizations can begin to identify some commonalities among them by conducting thorough research and collecting feedback. Then, they can tweak both the sales process and their offerings so as to better serve those specific needs.

For instance, an organization that sells B2B marketing solutions might gather customer feedback at every stage of its sales process to determine whether or not it’s meeting client expectations. By digging through relevant social media posts, online reviews, and customer feedback forms and conducting deep user research and more, they uncover two key findings:

Using this information, the business decides to prioritize product development to improve its software’s usability and to adjust its sales strategy to become more customer-centric and personalized. Over time, they're able to better meet their customers’ expectations to build brand loyalty, increase client satisfaction, reduce churn, and boost their profitability.

Why getting customer needs right matters

The stakes for accurate customer needs identification have never been higher. As noted earlier, Gartner's research shows 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between website information and seller-provided information, a direct result of organizations that haven't deeply understood their buyers' actual needs and expectations.

The cost of getting it wrong is severe. Gartner's June 2025 research on personalization found that poor personalization driven by incomplete needs understanding makes customers 3.2 times more likely to regret purchases, with 44% less likely to repurchase after negative personalization experiences.

Conversely, the upside is substantial.

When organizations truly understand and respond to customer needs, the results compound: increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%, according to foundational research from Harvard Business Review and Bain & Company, which continues to set the standard across the industry.

The path forward requires moving beyond surface-level assumptions to structured methodologies for uncovering what customers actually need, and this guide will walk you through exactly how to do it.

Types of customer needs: Product vs. service

While customer needs vary greatly (depending on industry, company size, current environment, objectives, and more), they typically fall into two categories: product needs and service needs. There are several different types of needs within those two groups, each of which requires a different solution.

Product needs

Product needs refer to the customers’ expectations of a business’s actual offerings. These included (but are not limited to):

• Functionality - Customers need the products they buy to function in a way that suits their needs and resolves their pain points. When they invest in a product, customers want the offering to fulfill its promised capabilities and include all purchased features.
• Performance - A product is not of any use to the customer if it doesn’t operate successfully and consistently. Clients expect that the solutions they purchase are in working order and perform properly so they can achieve their intended outcomes.
• Price - Each customer has a specific budget, and thus an established amount they’re willing to spend on a product. They need to find a solution that resolves their pain points and supports their goals while also remaining within the parameters of that budget.
• Compatibility/Integrations - More often than not, customers already have an existing ecosystem of tools and technologies that support their operations. They expect any new products they purchase to be compatible with those current tools, so as to get the most out of their tech stacks.
• User Experience - As customers evaluate potential solutions, they look for products and services that offer convenience and intuitiveness. They don’t want to invest in something that will require complex training or will go unused due to poor usability.

Service needs

Service needs are all the requirements customers have surrounding interactions with a solution provider and the business as a whole. This might include:

• Transparency - Today’s customers are quick to identify a business that’s trying to pull the wool over their eyes to make a sale. They expect complete transparency into what they’re being offered, how it will impact them, how much it will cost, and how the company from which they’re purchasing will handle any unforeseen issues.This demand for transparency connects directly to trust, which has become a deciding factor in purchase decisions. Accenture's Life Trends 2025 report shows that 62% of people say trust is an important factor when choosing to engage with a brand, while 52% have questioned online content more than before. For sales teams, this means every interaction, from initial outreach to post-sale support, must reinforce credibility and authenticity.
• Options - Customers want flexibility when it comes to the products and features they purchase, so offering rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions won’t inspire them to buy. They want to know that they have several options from which to choose (each in varying functionality, price points and payment options, and more) to feel confident that the solution will meet their unique needs.
• Accessibility - When a product breaks or the customer has a question, they need unfettered access to support. They expect to reach customer service and support teams quickly and easily, so businesses should offer several avenues of access (e.g. social media, email, phone, self-service portals, etc.).
• Empathy - Buyers want to know that the businesses from which they purchase truly understand their challenges and goals. They want to interact with sellers and customer support reps who lead with an authentic, empathetic, and consultative approach, rather than a pushy or promotional edge.
• Control - Today's buyers, particularly Millennial and Gen Z decision-makers, want autonomy over their purchasing journey. They prefer to research independently, compare options on their own timeline, and engage with sales only when they choose. Businesses that force buyers into rigid sales processes risk losing deals to competitors who offer flexible, self-directed experiences.
• Information - Information and research play a critical role in B2B purchasing decisions. As Gartner's 2025 research confirms, modern B2B buyers increasingly conduct their own research, with nearly two-thirds preferring to avoid sales reps entirely and a similar proportion reporting misalignment between what they read online and what sellers tell them. This growing reliance on self-directed research means that the information available during the buyer's journey significantly impacts their purchasing decisions.

This digital-first behavior extends even to enterprise purchases. Forrester's Predictions 2025: B2B Marketing and Sales shows that more than 50% of large B2B transactions valued at $1 million or more will be processed through digital self-serve channels, driven by Millennial and Gen Z buyers now in purchasing roles. 

For sales teams, this means the information you provide digitally must accurately reflect customer needs before any human conversation occurs. Meeting this expectation requires treating your digital content as a core part of your sales strategy, not an afterthought.

Frameworks for identifying customer needs

Before diving into specific methods, it helps to understand the frameworks that guide customer needs identification. Three approaches dominate modern B2B sales:

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)

This framework, developed by Tony Ulwick and popularized in B2B contexts, focuses on the "job" customers are trying to accomplish rather than the features they request. Instead of asking "What do you want in a product?" you ask "What outcome are you trying to achieve?" This shifts the conversation from surface-level preferences to underlying motivations. For a deeper look at this methodology, see Strategyn's guide to understanding customer needs.

Voice of Customer (VoC)

A systematic approach to capturing customer expectations, preferences, and aversions. According to Deeto's VoC implementation guide, VoC programs should track three essential metrics: feedback volume and response rates, as well as product improvement rates directly linked to customer feedback. 

This enables smart segmentation within CRM systems (such as identifying "frustrated new users" or "loyal customers wanting specific features"). In B2B contexts, the stakes are significantly higher because customer relationships are fewer but more valuable, buying cycles are longer, and switching costs are substantial, making VoC implementation particularly critical for retention and revenue growth.

Kano Model

This framework categorizes needs into must-haves, performance factors, and delighters. It helps prioritize which needs to address first by distinguishing between expectations that prevent dissatisfaction versus those that create genuine enthusiasm. The model is particularly useful when you need to make trade-off decisions about which customer needs to address first.

Each framework serves a distinct purpose: JTBD uncovers underlying motivations, VoC captures direct expectations, and the Kano Model helps prioritize which needs to address first. Most B2B organizations benefit from combining approaches based on their specific goals, using JTBD for new product development, VoC for ongoing relationship management, and Kano when making trade-off decisions about feature investments.

7 methods to identify customer needs

"If you build it, they will come," doesn't apply to product, service, or sales process that meets customer needs. Actually, the exact opposite rings true, as 66% of buyers expect a sales rep to tailor solutions to their individual needs. They don’t want providers to develop and pitch solutions they think buyers might need. They want them to build their solutions, sales processes, and experiences around their unique pain points, objectives, challenges, and needs.

But identifying those needs upon which a successful business (and its sales strategy) relies isn’t as easy as ticking expectations off a predetermined list. Each organization’s customers are different, and they should take the time to uncover which expectations are most relevant to their buyers, then meet or exceed them.

Below are several methods by which a business can identify its customers’ specific needs.

1. Customer feedback

Collecting, analyzing, and acting upon customer feedback can give a company a serious leg up against its competitors. While 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, many organizations struggle to demonstrate they're listening. This creates an opportunity for companies that collect feedback and transparently act on it to differentiate themselves.

Customer feedback can take the form of social media posts, on-site prompts or chat boxes, on- and off-site reviews, and more. Regardless of how a business requests and collects feedback, it’s essential to ask buyers open-ended questions about:

Then, the organization should analyze their customers’ responses on a regular basis to identify key trends and patterns. If they do make subsequent adjustments to their products, services, sales process, or customer service strategy, they should be transparent with buyers about the change, citing customer feedback as the catalyst for their decision. This will help them establish trust with customers and illustrate their willingness to adapt to their clients’ needs.

2. User research

If your product and/or service teams aren’t already conducting user research, now might be a great time to start. There are myriad excuses for foregoing user research (e.g., lack of time, resources, or budget, assuming that customers don’t know what they want, etc.), but a proper mix of qualitative and quantitative user research can affect several revenue-relevant metrics, including:

• Customer acquisition - By conducting user research that gleans insights into how your audience interacts with your sellers, your website, and your overall brand, you can begin to tweak your messaging and engagement strategies for increased conversions.This user research approach is increasingly critical as buyer expectations shift dramatically. With the majority of B2B buyers now preferring self-directed purchasing journeys and more than half of large enterprise transactions being processed through digital self-serve channels (as Forrester and Gartner's research confirms), the consistency and alignment of your messaging across all customer touchpoints directly impacts your ability to meet buyer expectations and drive conversions.Outreach's Sales 2025 Data Report found that AI tools reduced research time by 90% for teams that adopted them, enabling sellers to focus on higher-value customer interactions and more strategic account engagement. This efficiency gain makes comprehensive user research more accessible, even for teams with limited bandwidth.
• Customer retention - Retaining an existing customer is much more cost-effective than acquiring a new one, but how do your existing clients feel about your business, your products and services, and the support they receive? User research helps your teams identify clients’ specific pain points, goals, and any issues they may be having, and course-correct before they jump ship to a competitor.

Don’t forget that user research can be costly and incredibly time-consuming if you don’t adequately plan for the process. Be sure to choose a research method that’s relevant to your industry, products and services, and intended audience, get stakeholder buy-in early on, and align your research with broader business goals to ensure success.

3. Customer surveys

While customer feedback can help you collect longer-form, detailed responses, surveys can enable your team to quickly gain insights into specific areas for improvement. They’re helpful for evaluating overall customer satisfaction to predict retention and product or service purchases. It’s vital to remember that customer surveys are only truly valuable if they include the right questions and are utilized at the right time, so be sure to:

• Keep customer surveys short and concise
• Eliminate unnecessary questions that aren’t directly tied to what you want to know
• Send surveys during key moments in the buying journey (like directly after a demo, immediately following a purchase, or prior to a potential subscription renewal)
• Use consistent rating scales (e.g. 1-10, wherein 1 represents extremely dissatisfied and 10 equates to extremely satisfied) to avoid confusion
• Skip the leading questions, which can irritate customers and skew your data
• Offer incentives (like discounts or entry for a giveaway) for customers who participate

Your team can implement in-product surveys, send them via email, or use on-page pop-up surveys on the company’s website. Don’t be afraid to play around with different methods until you find one that garners high levels of participation.

4. AI-powered customer insights

Traditional methods for identifying customer needs, while still valuable, are being transformed by AI capabilities that surface insights at scale. Gartner's Seller Action Hub framework describes how modern AI systems convert granular data points (what Gartner calls "atomic insights") into hypertargeted value messages. 

These synthesized perspectives draw from every buyer interaction with an organization, both human and digital, to contextualize messaging around each prospect's needs and expectations.

Rather than manually combing through dozens of sources, sales teams can now use AI to analyze company 10-K filings, LinkedIn activity, recent news, funding announcements, and leadership changes, then synthesize this information into actionable talking points. 

Agentic AI takes this further by handling autonomous task execution for prospecting, outreach, and buyer inquiry responses, enabling personalization at a scale that was previously impractical in B2B sales.

However, personalization done poorly backfires. The same Gartner research found that 53% of customers had negative experiences with personalized marketing. Those customers were 3.2 times more likely to regret their purchase and 44% less likely to buy again. The lesson for teams implementing AI-powered lead generation: your AI tools must surface genuinely useful, accurate insights rather than generic personalization. Precision in customer needs identification directly impacts the effectiveness of AI-driven outreach.

5. Sales team and service team interviews

Several members of your sales and service teams likely have their ears to the ground when it comes to customer needs. They have constant interaction with customers and prospects, and their insights are incredibly valuable – so put them to use.

Interview these team members to learn which problems, needs, or desires they frequently hear from customers and potential buyers. If they’re doing their jobs properly and leading with empathy, they’ll already have deep knowledge around your customers' biggest pain points, your company’s shortcomings, and the changes they’d like to see.

6. Competitive research

Researching your competitors is a vital part of understanding your own offerings, establishing benchmarks for growth, identifying your company’s unique differentiators, and making intelligent decisions that help you exceed customer expectations.

For enterprise sales teams, competitive intelligence feeds directly into account-based selling strategies, where understanding specific account needs and how competitors serve them becomes critical to winning key deals. This targeted approach, detailed in Outreach's Account-based selling: The ultimate guide for 2025, enables teams to deliver personalized engagement and identify the highest-value opportunities within their target accounts.

This should go far beyond scouring their social media profiles or Google Ads: It should also include a deep look at the companies’ histories, their largest customers, and where they’re thriving or failing to meet customer expectations. Dive into the strategies they’re using (and whether or not those strategies are successful), and consider implementing them yourself, if necessary. Don’t be afraid to study their weaknesses and capitalize on those shortcomings by filling in the gaps at your own company.

Pay particular attention to customer reviews of competitor products on third-party sites like G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius. These reviews often reveal unmet needs that competitors aren't addressing – gaps your organization can fill. Track competitor pricing changes, feature announcements, and positioning shifts to understand how the market's perception of customer needs is evolving.

7. Keyword research, search landscape analysis, & social listening 

Buyers turn to search engines like Google for their every whim, so it’s essential to understand the keywords and phrases they use when looking to solve their pain points. After all, they can’t make a purchase from your business if they can’t find you first.

Start by conducting thorough keyword research and identifying how your competitors position themselves. Compile a list of all the keywords that are relevant to your industry, products, services, and business, and measure their monthly search volume (a keyword research or online ranking tool can help!) to determine which ones are worth pursuing.

Once you’ve analyzed the results, you can begin creating valuable content on your own site that targets the user needs attached to your most relevant keywords. This will help your business get in front of the right audience and demonstrate its position as a thought leader in the space. After all, customers want content that resonates with their needs, shows them you understand those needs, and delivers the information they need when they need it.

5 common mistakes when identifying customer needs

Even experienced sales teams fall into patterns that undermine their customer needs identification efforts. Avoiding these mistakes can significantly improve your success rate:

1. Assuming you already know what customers need. Your existing customers and your target prospects may have different priorities. Relying on assumptions from past deals rather than fresh research leads to misaligned messaging and missed opportunities.
2. Asking leading questions. Questions like "Wouldn't you love to reduce costs by 50%?" push customers toward answers you want to hear rather than revealing their actual priorities. Use open-ended questions that let customers articulate needs in their own words. This aligns with Strategyn's Jobs-to-be-Done framework, which emphasizes capturing 'desired outcomes' (measurable success metrics) rather than assuming solutions based on feature requests.
3. Focusing only on stated needs. Customers often don't articulate their deepest pain points because they've accepted them as "just how things are." The Gartner research cited earlier found that 69% of B2B buyers encounter inconsistencies between website information and what sellers tell them, highlighting the gap between what companies think customers need and what customers actually experience. Look for unstated needs by observing behavior, analyzing support tickets, and reading between the lines during conversations.
4. Collecting feedback without acting on it. As Salesforce's research shows, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. If you gather insights but don't visibly respond to them, customers lose confidence that their voice matters.
5. Treating needs identification as a one-time event. Customer needs evolve as markets shift, competitors emerge, and business conditions change. Build continuous feedback loops rather than relying on quarterly surveys or annual research projects.

How to act on customer needs once you've identified them

Once you’ve identified your customer’s most pressing needs, you can begin prioritizing the ones that will make the greatest impact on their experiences. Let’s look at the same example we used earlier, wherein a B2B marketing software company discovered two pressing issues:

1. Their customers are struggling to use their marketing automation software because it’s unnecessarily complicated.
2. Their prospects are underwhelmed and irritated by their sellers’ engagements, which are generalized and insincere.

They’ve also identified some other potential areas for concern (like a lack of payment options and a new feature request), but they’ve decided to first focus on the problems above because they’re likely to significantly impact retention and acquisition.

To solve for these needs, the business decides to work solutions into its product roadmaps. They adjust their product vision, strategy, and goals to align with improving the product’s usability so that their customers can more easily implement and utilize their software. They invest the proper time, resources, and funds into UX research and design. Once they’ve improved the product, they send an email announcement to existing and potential customers and publish a blog post on their website to address the changes.

On the service side, they decide to tweak the sales process to include highly personalized interactions. They offer unique touches (gained by data, customer feedback and surveys, buyer sentiment analysis, and active listening) in sales emails, curated online and virtual events, and more to let their prospects know they’re in tune with their needs and preferences. They tailor each interaction to their customers’ liking, including the cadence, format, and style with which they’re delivered.

The company measures its progress over time, too, using feedback and data to evaluate its efforts. They adjust their strategies as they go to ensure they’re fully meeting their customers’ expectations and providing the best possible experiences at every turn.

Best practices for acting on customer needs

Beyond this example, here are proven approaches for acting on identified customer needs:

Prioritize by business impact. Not all needs carry equal weight. Focus first on needs that directly affect retention (for existing customers) or conversion (for prospects). Use a simple impact-effort matrix to rank which needs to address immediately versus those that can wait.

Close the feedback loop visibly. When you make changes based on customer input, tell them. Send targeted communications explaining what you heard and what you changed. This builds trust and encourages future feedback.

Align product and sales teams. Customer needs insights often reveal gaps that require cross-functional solutions. Establish regular syncs between sales, product, and customer success to ensure insights translate into coordinated action rather than siloed responses.

Build needs identification into your sales process. Rather than treating needs identification as a one-time research project, embed it into every customer interaction. Train sellers to use discovery calls, QBRs, and renewal conversations as ongoing opportunities to surface evolving needs.

Measure outcomes, not just activities. Track whether your actions actually improved customer satisfaction, retention, or conversion, not just whether you implemented changes. Use metrics like NPS trends, churn rates, and win/loss analysis to validate your approach.

Technology that helps you identify and act on customer needs

It’s clear that uncovering your customers’ needs, desires, and objectives is absolutely crucial to offering competitive solutions. But the process can be time-consuming, costly, and fruitless if your business doesn’t have the proper tools for support.

The top sales prospecting trends for 2025 demonstrate how quickly AI adoption is accelerating, with 54% of sales professionals now using AI for personalized email creation, a clear indicator of how technology is transforming customer outreach strategies.

Outreach’s AI Revenue Workflow Platform helps sellers turn insights into actions and takes the guesswork out of uncovering and solving buyer needs. It uses AI-driven buyer sentiment tools for understanding and acting on customers’ emotional responses, and uses key data to help your team make smarter decisions about the sales process and buying journey.

FAQs

What strategies can sales teams use to better understand customer needs and expectations?

The most effective strategies combine direct feedback methods with behavioral analysis. Conduct customer interviews with open-ended questions, monitor social media for sentiment and unmet needs, analyze CRM data for purchasing patterns, and train sales teams on active listening and empathy. Integrating these approaches, rather than relying on any single method, provides the most complete picture of customer expectations.

How can businesses prioritize solving customer needs that will have the biggest impact on retention and acquisition?

Businesses should prioritize customer needs based on their direct impact on retention and acquisition metrics. Start by analyzing feedback, surveys, and support tickets to identify patterns in pain points that affect satisfaction and loyalty. Then rank these needs using an impact-effort matrix, addressing high-impact, low-effort issues first. Align cross-functional teams around the highest-priority needs to ensure product and service improvements directly improve customer outcomes.

What role does user research play in developing customer-centric sales strategies?

User research provides direct insight into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points that shape effective sales strategies. It reveals friction points in the buying journey, helps tailor messaging to specific segments, and validates assumptions about what customers actually need. Teams that integrate ongoing user research stay responsive to shifting expectations and build stronger customer relationships.

In what ways can technology like AI-driven tools enhance the process of identifying and meeting customer needs?

AI-driven tools analyze large volumes of customer interaction data to surface patterns and preferences that manual analysis would miss. They enable real-time sentiment analysis, automate routine inquiries, and predict customer needs based on behavioral signals. This allows sales teams to personalize outreach at scale while freeing up time for higher-value conversations.

How can feedback from sales and service teams be effectively integrated into improving customer experiences?

Sales and service teams should log customer insights systematically in CRM systems and share findings in regular cross-functional meetings. This feedback should inform product development, marketing messaging, and support processes. The key is creating a structured loop where frontline insights reach decision-makers and result in visible changes that teams can communicate back to customers.