Buyer Level of Receptivity

by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

You've probably been focusing largely on your own perceptions of the sales situation, as a way of making your position regarding your current objective more visible and of highlighting areas of uncertainty in your strategy. What you really should be doing is focusing on the perceptions of the various buying influences for that sales objective, not your own. The first thing you need to do is to determine who all the buying influences are. Next, you have to find out how each of them feels about what you're trying to accomplish in his or her account. Zeroing in on the various levels of a buyer's receptivity helps you to determine more effectively how a buyer feels about your proposal.

You need to be able to gauge your buyers' receptivity to your proposals because, without an understanding of this factor, you can easily end up trying to sell someone who isn't really there -- one whose perception of reality is so different from your own that he or she is utterly incapable of appreciating why any transaction ought to occur in the first place. In addition, if you don't have a reliable method of gauging receptivity, you can easily fall into one of three fatal traps:

1. You can take your own perceptions of reality as the key to the sale.
2. You can assume that your perceptions of reality are the same as those of your buying influences.
3. You can recognize that the buying influences' perceptions of reality are different from yours, conclude that their perceptions are wrong or irrelevant.

The strategy outlined here is designed to help you avoid these common errors of judgment by focusing on what really counts in the sale: how each buyer is likely to react to the change that your proposal is offering.

No matter what the external "facts" of your sales environment, most changes can be seen as either a threat or an opportunity, depending on your response to them.

The same thing goes for the people who are the buying influences in your sale. Change is impacting their business environments too, and like you, they can have a variety of responses to change. Additionally, they have to respond to one significant change that you by definition see as an opportunity, but that they can easily see as a threat. That change is your sales proposal itself.

You probably don't like to think of your sales proposals as threats, but buyers can, and often do, see them in just this way. The strategic sales professional understands that any time you ask someone to buy something, you're asking that person to make a change. Neither the seller nor the buyer may consciously identify the sales proposal as an offer to make a change, but change is nonetheless a critical hidden factor in every sale. Since people react to change in different ways, and since virtually every change can be viewed as either a threat or an opportunity, there's always the chance that a buying influence will perceive your sales proposal as threatening even when it's "obvious" to you that it's not.

The non-strategic salesperson often ignores the hidden factor of change. Dazzled by the elegance of your own presentation or impressed by the "perfect fit" between your product and a buying influence's objective needs, you may overlook the buyer's potential perception of the proposal as an unwanted or threatening change, and assume that she will respond in the "obviously" sensible manner--that is, affirmatively.

Experience has proven that this is a dangerously myopic approach. No matter how good the "facts" of a given sales situation, they may still look terrible to one or more of your buying influences. If that's the case, it's the facts, not the buyers' perceptions of them, that are irrelevant. Only by understanding each of your buying influence's perception of reality will you be able to predict accurately his or her response to your proposal.

By "perception of reality" we don't mean the buyer's general outlook on life, philosophy, or overall approach to business. We mean his or her perception of the immediate business situation and of what will happen to that situation if the change that you are offering is accepted.

A buying influence can bring four different reactions, or "response modes," to a sales situation. Each of these four modes is derived from a different perception of the immediate business reality. And each one leads to a different level of receptivity to incoming sales proposals. Because each of the four perceptions of reality leads to a different response mode, and because each mode leads to a different level of receptivity, the strategic sales professional has to develop a different sales approach for each of the four perceptions.

We need to stress, however, that response modes are not descriptions of attitude or personality. They don't refer to categories of people, but to different ways in which buyers can perceive immediate, specific situations. They show you where the person is coming from in relation to the specific change you're offering. That's all. You can speak of a given individual being in a certain mode with regard to a given business situation. It makes no sense to say that someone is always in that mode.

This is a critical point, because in many account situations you'll find yourself selling to a positive, growth-oriented person who, at the moment your call is scheduled, happens to see your proposal as nothing but trouble. If you focus on what you see as this person's difficult personality, you may conclude, erroneously, that your cause is lost. If you assess his or her reaction, you may find that it's only your timing that's off You may find that, if you adopt a strategy that takes timing into account, this buyer could become your strongest ally.

Predicting the best time to call on a buying influence is one of the great unknowns in the world of selling. Knowing when to approach a customer is often just as important, but usually not as predictable, as knowing what the customer and her company needs. As a result, you can have a product that's tailor-made for someone's apparent business needs, but if you approach that person at the wrong time of the month, or week, or selling cycle, you can easily find yourself -- through no fault of your own -- going up against a blank wall.

From The New Strategic Selling by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja. © 1998 by Miller Heiman, Inc. All rights reserved by permission of William Morrow, Inc.