Why People Buy

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by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja

Have you ever considered why your customers buy from you? If so, you probably came up with an answer similar to the following:

“We had the most advanced product in the market.”

“It was the best presentation I’ve ever done.”

“The competition couldn’t touch our service guarantee.”

“We just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Four different responses with one thing in common: They all focus on something that you did rather than what went through your buyer’s mind.

That’s predictable. Those of us who sell for a living are used to thinking of ourselves as initiators. Star sellers are supposed to be in charge of the sale, aggressively and heroically making it happen. Naturally, we think of a sale as something that flows, irresistibly, from us to them. But that’s not the way it happens. Never has been. When it comes to the close, it’s your customers’ thinking that counts; it’s their reason for buying that actually makes things happen. Certainly, you can positively affect your customers’ decisions by having state-of-the-art products, great presentations, competitive service packages, and good timing. But such seller-driven elements of the buy-sell situation are not the reason that your customers buy.

The reason that customers buy is almost painfully simple – so simple that, to our peril, we often overlook it. It is only indirectly related to the superiority of your product, and even more tangentially related to the sizzle of your spiel. Here’s the plain truth:

People decide to buy on the basis of expectation. They buy what they believe your product or service will do for them.

In our conceptual selling programs, we refer to “what they believe” as the customer’s Concept. We don’t mean your concept, or your company’s. As we use the term, Concept has nothing to do with the production design that brings tears to the eyes of the technogeeks in your R&D unit. Nor is it the same as the concept behind your latest ad campaign. The customer’s Concept is inside his or her head. It’s a mental picture of what he or she expects to accomplish. It may have a lot, a little, or nothing to do with your product.

None of this would be any more useful than the average biz-school buzz talk if you couldn’t also deliver products or services to your customers, and bank on resulting revenue and commissions. To do that, you have to take a second step. Once you fully understand what the prospective buyer wants to get done, you still have to make it clear to him or her exactly how your product or service would accomplish that. That’s what we call making a Product Sale.

There’s nothing mysterious about this. Sellers are perfectly used to making Product Sales. The problem is that they often try to make a sale too early, before they have a clear understanding of the customer’s Concept, their solution image. That leads inevitably to miscommunication, to force-feeding the customer with your mental picture, and in the worst cases to closing doors.

Yes, you have to demonstrate the excellence of your product. But no product is excellent in itself. It’s excellent only if it fulfills a customer’s need, and it does that only by satisfying a solution image. That’s why every successful sales scenario is composed of two separate steps.

1. In understanding the Concept, you develop as clear a picture as possible of the customer’s solution image.

2. In making the Product Sale, you demonstrate how your company can provide something that fits this image.

“Developing a clear picture” doesn’t sound very much like “selling.” True enough, according to the old definition. But an expanded – and more accurate -- definition of selling would include everything you and your company do to keep your revenue flowing. These days, understanding what your customers want to accomplish is an essential element of this overall picture – so essential, in fact, that it’s a prerequisite to doing anything else.

In other words, there’s a logical sequence to the two steps we’ve mentioned. Not one customer in a hundred will agree to buy a product or service without first believing that it’s going to accomplish something for him or her. So, if you’re selling smart, understand the Concept first.

Here’s a practical tip for making that advice a reality. It’s a powerful technique called Golden Silence. In practicing Golden Silence, you simply pause for three or four seconds at two different points in the call: after every question that you pose to the customer, and again after every response that you get back. The first pause, which we call Golden Silence I, allows the customer to think through a relevant reply, without being hustled toward the close – or getting a feeling of being hustled. The second pause, Golden Silence II, gives you, the seller, an equal opportunity for thoughtful reflection. The result of these two pauses is a better conversational flow – something that the “talk-talk-talk” style invariably destroys.

Good listening also implies letting the customer set the conversational agenda. That’s something that traditional sellers are reluctant to do, because they think it risks letting the call get “out of control.” But the most accomplished sellers know it’s central to success. There are hard data on this point. In a recent study of top sales professionals, a consulting firm found that high achievers were almost twice as likely as average achievers to adapt their selling to a customer’s “change of agenda.” Thus your job as a professional sellers is twofold:

1. First, ask questions designed to help the customer articulate a solution image.

2. Second, shut up and listen.

Use these techniques on your next call and we think you’ll agree with a leading sales manager who says, “It’s the person who talks the least who usually wins.”