How do we influence them to buy?
To Buy Is Human
People act on emotion and justify with logic. From complex to completely transactional impulse purchases, emotions drive buying decisions. Science is stacking up one study after another demonstrating the leverage emotion exerts on the choices we make. The real-life examples are legion:
■ A banking executive makes a $500,000 enterprise software decision because she likes the account executive, Geoff, better than the competitor's sale rep – she tells him she appreciated his thoughtful birthday card.
■ Michelle pays more for the same mattress because she feels like her sales rep Gwen cares more about her than Ray at Gwen's competitor.
■ A vice president of safety and compliance at a major electrical utility makes a million-dollar decision on safety equipment because he “just feels like he can trust the rep he's working with.”
■ Carrie buys a car that is not exactly what she wants because she doesn't want to let down the sales rep who helped her.
■ At a wine-tasting party, people feel that the wine with the higher price tag tastes better even though every bottle is filled with the exact same low-cost wine.2
■ John buys a stock because the company's name is easier to pronounce.3
■ People choose Pepsi in a blind taste test but think Coke tastes better when they can see the cans.4
■ I close my dream account because the stakeholders feel that we are similar to them.
Daniel Pink says that to sell is human;5 likewise, to buy is human. Though as humans we are certain that we're making choices based on rational logic, our best interests, or organized facts, science says that we often don't.
In one research study, a liquor store played German beer hall music on Tuesdays and French music on Wednesdays. Correspondingly, German beer sales went up on Tuesdays, with French wine sales increasing on Wednesdays.
On the sidewalk outside the store, researchers peered into brown bags and interviewed the patrons to learn why they purchased the beer or wine. Most of the shoppers gave logical reasons for their purchase —saw it in a magazine, recommended by a friend, cooking steaks tonight, like the taste of premium beer– proving that people buy on emotion and justify with logic.
As humans, it is important that our self-image correlate with our decisions. So, we fall on logic to justify subconscious buying behavior.
Emotion is why well-educated executives make multimillion-dollar decisions with massive implications for their companies because they feel that one sales team cares about them more than another. Despite all of the tools, information, and data at their fingertips, in our Internet-connected world, buyers continue to make irrational decisions.
Am I saying that product features, quality, specs, delivery options and speed, service, technology, locations, price, and other tangible attributes of your offering don't matter? Of course not. These things absolutely matter. All are tickets to the game, and a deficiency in one of these areas can eliminate you before you ever get started.
However, the sales profession, inclusive of salespeople, sales trainers, sales leaders, and the marketing teams that support sales, are and have been under the collective delusion that buyers make logical decisions that are in their own or their company's best interest – that they weigh decisions rationally and objectively.
Evidence upon evidence and data stacked on data refute this assumption. Frankly, you don't need to look far for proof.
I have no doubt that you've been frustrated with a prospect into which you've poured heart and soul. You've built the case why they should do business with you. You've analyzed their current situation and shown them how you can save them money, time, and stress, and offered them better service.
In such a case, the proof was irrefutable, your references were impeccable, and there was even a compelling trigger event to drive urgency. Yet, instead of signing your agreement, they gave your competitor (who had taken them for granted, provided shoddy service, pissed them off, and overbilled them for the headache) a second chance. I know – I've been there, and it's maddening.
If we were to ask your buyer why they chose to remain with a vendor that was not working in their best interest, they would lead off with a number of what they felt were logical, rational reasons. But refuting and arguing the facts would get you nowhere. The buyer would just dig in and become intractable.
What they would be unable to explain or unwilling to admit is their fear of making a mistake; or that there was just something about you that, at the subconscious level, they didn't trust; or that because they avoid conflict, firing the current vendor would put them in an uncomfortable position.
Layer upon layer of emotions – conscious and subconscious – drive this irrational choice. Yet they explain the decision in completely rational terms.
The Secret Ingredient
As a sales professional, understanding how emotions dominate and drive buying decisions is critical to supercharging your income and advancing your career.
When all things are equal – and in today's marketplace there are rarely huge gaps or differences between competitors (at least from the buyer's viewpoint) – your ability to influence the emotions of stakeholders while regulating your own disruptive emotions, as you move deals through the sales pipeline, gives you a distinct competitive edge.
If you'll just take a moment to consider the deals you've lost and won and how most salespeople approach buyers, you'll come face-to-face with the truth:
■ A truth that is invisible to countless salespeople.
■ A truth invisible to sales trainers and experts whose house of cards begins to fall apart when their process-based, data-driven, science of selling fallacy meets irrational emotions.
■ A truth ignored by the challengers who pontificate to stakeholders about how they're “doing it all wrong,” and the insight sellers who teach their poor, ignorant buyers how to “do it right.”
Borrowing one of my favorite lines from the movie The Big Short, “The truth is like poetry. But people fucking hate poetry.”
Emotions are difficult to wrap our arms around and are sometimes hard to face. It's so much easier to pitch the features of a widget than to tune into the emotions of the stakeholder sitting across from you. The brutal, inconvenient truth is you can pitch, challenge, teach, and offer insight to your heart's content, but it will not matter because:
People buy for their reasons, not yours.
Approach Buyers the Way They Buy
Selling is human. Buying is human. Both pursuits are woven into the imperfect fabric of human emotions. No matter what you sell, your sales cycle, or the complexity of the sales and buying process, emotions play a crucial role in the outcomes of your sales conversations, interactions, and deals.
Each time you (and the members of your selling team) and each stakeholder involved in the buying decision meet, those emotions collide.
Most
Lisa Trei, “Baba Shiv: How a Wine's Price Tag Affect Its Taste,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/baba-shiv-how-wines-price-tag-affect-its-taste.
Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Predicting Short-Term Stock Fluctuations by Using Processing Fluency,”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/subliminal/201205/why-people-choose-coke-over-pepsi.
Daniel Pink,
