Why People Really Buy

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by Miller Heiman

Three years ago a major American manufacturer, experiencing problems with the food service company that was managing its dozens of employee cafeterias around the country, went looking for a replacement. On orders from the top, the vice-president in charge of operations invited the incumbent's four major competitors to the manufacturer's Chicago headquarters. Each candidate for the replacement contract, the invitation letter stipulated, would be given ninety minutes to present its case to a selection committee composed of finance, operations, and employee service managers. The presentation date was one month away.

Because this multiple-site food service contract involved potential income of several million dollars a year, all four of the invited vendors expressed strong interest. Their sales managers designated top people to handle the new account presentation and made it painfully clear that their pitches had better be perfect. The four individuals who were chosen--all top-notch, experienced professionals-- understood that the Chicago sales call would be one of the most important calls they would ever make. So they spared no effort in preparing.

But they didn't all prepare the same way. Three of the four prepared in the sales rep's time-honored manner. They crammed their heads full of product and service specs and burned a month's worth of midnight oil memorizing their companies' capabilities. They boned up on the presentation techniques that had worked for them over the years. And they prepared perfectly timed, brilliantly written pitches that made their individual service packages look like offers no sane person could refuse. The pitches all had catchy anecdotal openings (for establishing "rapport" with the committee), plenty of arguments and counterarguments (for deflecting the inevitable objections), and a copious supply of trial closes. Not to mention the usual supportive material. Among the three of them, these candidates had put together enough spread sheets, statistical abstracts, overheads, diagrams, and colored slides to keep a congressional committee in session for a year.

The man sent in by the fourth candidate--we'll call him Gene--didn't buy this traditional wisdom. Gene had a method for managing his face-to-face sales calls that completely reversed everything he had done in presentations before-- and that went to the heart of the issue: why people really buy.

Understanding your customers' buying process makes you a much smarter and more successful seller than you can possibly be if you limit yourself to a three-ring display of your product, hoping one of the acts will hit home. The first step in understanding that process is to remember a seemingly simple message:

People buy for their own reasons, not for yours.

The message is critical because until you know your customers' reasons for wanting--or not wanting--to buy, you're selling with blinders on. No matter how many reasons you may have for believing your product or service is a great buy, they will mean nothing unless each customer has solid reasons of his own for wanting to do business with you.

Difficult though it can be to find out what those reasons are, sales success today depends on doing just that--and on staying in touch with each customer's reasons when they change (as they often do) from one sales call to another. In this era of accelerated change, when even your long-time customers face new problems every day that can radically alter the way they see your product or service, taking a customer's views for granted, even for a minute, can doom the most "secure" account. In fact, that's just what had happened in the Chicago contract: the incumbent was on the way out because he had failed to keep on top of the manufacturer's altered view of his service needs.

We consider understanding your customers' needs so important that we make this understanding, along with the product knowledge every professional has to have, part of a sales success "equation":

Knowledge of their Needs + Product/Service Knowledge = Solid Sales Commitment

As the arrangement of factors here implies, we believe that every solid sale must begin with the customer: with his needs, his problems, and his range of reasons for buying. Obvious? To anybody involved in selling as a profession, the fact that people buy for their own reasons--and that until you know those reasons you're selling blind--ought to be the most obvious fact in the world.

But it isn't. To judge from the way most salespeople approach their customers, in fact, what's really obvious is that they've not only missed this truth, but that they've been encouraged, even trained, to ignore it. That was certainly evident in the way Gene's competitors prepared for the Chicago call. All their statistics and slide shows and zippy phrases boiled down to a message, hidden though it was, that could be translated simply: "Here are my reasons that you guys ought to want to buy."

In the month before the Chicago presentation, as his competitors were planning floor shows that would have done Las Vegas proud, Gene kept "the most obvious fact in the world" firmly in mind. He prepared no dog and pony show, no list of objections to be overcome, no letter-perfect ninety-minute spiel. Instead he focused on what he had to find out to determine whether, in fact, his company could provide a solution the manufacturer could use.

In searching for the customer's reasons for wanting to buy, he did some background work on the manufacturer's capabilities and problems: he talked to people who had done business with the manufacturer before; he visited one of their plant sites to get a first-hand look at their current cafeteria operations; he tried to learn as much as he could about why they were so dissatisfied.

He didn't get all the answers, of course; and so he started making a list--not of statements he would make to the committee, but of some very specific questions to ask before he began. That list of questions became the basis for Gene's entire presentation.

Did his seemingly maverick planning work? Did the question-intensive, client-centered preparation for this call--the pivotal sales call of his career--turn out to be more effective than the traditional circus acts?

After he had nailed down the contract and pocketed a six-figure commission, Gene explained just how well it had worked. "It was almost too easy," he said. "I didn't have to say more than fifty words. I introduced myself, told them I understood they were having difficulties with their food service operation, and asked them to tell me what they were."

"For most of the next hour I could barely get a word in edgewise. They fell all over themselves helping me to pinpoint their problems. About every ten minutes there would be a lull, I would question them about an area where there was still a gap in my information, and the whole thing would start up again. First, I got the missing information that was vital for my under-standing of the buying process. Then, most of what I had to do in the presentation was to draw them out and take notes."

"When they finally wound down, I just scanned the notes and gave it back to them. 'It seems like you're having trouble in this area, and this, and this. Here's what we can fix, and here's how I think we can do it.' It became the most natural thing in the world for me to give them a quick, no-bull rundown of how we could address their problems. By that time we were in the sale together--we really had become partners in the process. I didn't even have to quote them a price; they begged me to get the contract work moving."

"As I was walking out," Gene finished, "and making mental notes for our lawyers, I passed the next guy coming in. He was lugging all these portfolios and projectors, and I just grinned inside."