Why Buyers Buy

 

Congratulations on closing that big deal! You worked hard, you fought off the competition and you wowed the decision maker. It all paid off. Now, can you do it again? How would you know? The truth is, you can’t know UNLESS you know exactly why this customer bought from you this time.

"Well, that is simple," you say. "We had the best product and we gave them a great price!"

Interesting, if true. But, are you sure it is true? Plenty of customers buy for reasons that don’t have anything to do with simply getting the very best product, or getting the lowest price, or didn’t you know that? The truth is, customers make purchases based on a whole range of reasons, and unless you have a very good understanding of what those reasons are, and unless you know how to uncover those reasons, you may come out firing blanks next time.

Have you ever closed a deal after a lot of hard work and said to yourself, "Okay, I think I have finally figured this out. All I have to do from now on is ? (fill in the new formula you have discovered)." Only, the next time you face a client and implement your new strategy – thud– it falls flat, right along with your ego. Maybe you could still learn some things about why buyers really buy.

Here is just a partial list of the things that influence customer buying decisions:

Price - Deliverability – Contract Wording -Past Relationship - Reputation - Sales Rep Responsiveness - Invoicing Terms - Past Performance -Your Personality – Entertainment - Reliability of Information -Executive Relationship– Quality - Recommendation From Internal Users - Recommendations From External Sources - Added Value–Training - License Agreement - Media – Deliverability - Unique Qualities - Legacy Systems - 3rd Party Software - "Keeping up w/ the Jones" - Product Support - Completeness of Data Set– Timeliness - Technical Content

Once you start looking at the situation from this perspective, I bet you can come up with at least this many more reasons on your own. The point is, if you only focus on product and price with your client, you will totally miss other equally important– even more important– reasons that influence their buying decisions.

So, what can you do to make sure you get the bigger picture? After all, doesn’t it just make sense that it would be easier to close the sale if you knew not only what the customer wanted to buy, but what factors were going to have the most impact on their decision to buy from you?

The best way – actually, the only way – to accomplish this is to learn how to ask the kind of questions that will help uncover the answers you need. Here are some suggested questions to Launch! your thinking about the kind of questions you should be asking:

 

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Quick Tip – The 80-20 Rule of Prospecting

The Rule of 80-20 seems to govern a lot of areas of human behavior, but here is a way to apply it to your prospecting strategy. Let’s assume for a minute that 100% represents the total number of customers in your market that could receive a significant benefit from your products or services. In that case, the 80-20 rule tells us that at any given time only 20% of those potential customers are even looking for a solution. The other 80% either don’t realize they have a problem, don’t know you are there or they don’t have any idea that the solution you offer even exists. Looking at it this way, your potential market has suddenly become HUGE. If you are just going back to the same old customers over and over again, you are probably undercutting your sales potential by as much as 30%, and that is on the low side.