Understanding Buyer Psychology
Buying decisions are generally more complex than they may at first appear. We look behind the buyer’s stated rationale for the decision and to uncover the psychology that is often hidden.
Helping Your Customers To Justify Their Decisions
Sellers must make sure that the buyer is in a position to justify the decision. Otherwise the risk of a stalled deal increases greatly. This is particularly important when decisions are driven by instinct or emotion.
Is There Pressure On Your Buyer’s Numbers?
‘What is the pressure on your buyer’s numbers?’ As a salesperson that is an important question for you to ask.
Where Have All The Savings Gone? Buyer Leakages As Sales Opportunities
Procurement is under pressure to continually cut costs. However a high level of leakage makes delivering fully on promised savings a challenge. That presents the seller with a number of opportunities.
Selling To Busy Buyers: What’s Your Decision Simplification Strategy?
Research into the science of decision making tells us that customers often simplify the basis on which buying decision are made. It is important for the seller to understand the buyer’s decision simplification strategy and to tailor their proposition accordingly.
Is Relationship Selling Under Attack?
Relationships are an essential ingredient of successful selling. But will your relationship survive a change in the customers strategy, increasing budgetary pressures or the involvement of procurement? In this insight we examine the challenges to relationship selling and how they can be met.
The Cost-Saver Menu: 11 Ways To Help Your Buyer Save
Imagine if you could give the buyer a menu of ways to save money, other than cutting your margins. This insight shows you how.
Are You Using The IKEA Effect To Help Them Buy?
The IKEA Effect provides a clear warning to sellers – ensure the buyer is involved in the process of defining, building, or tailoring your product, or at least in the process of purchase and justification.
Why Only Hard Savings Can Close The Deal
Sellers are not the only ones obsessed with making their numbers. Buyers have targets too – typically ambitious targets for cost reduction. However, increasingly only hard savings have the power to close the sale. We all know that buyers are increasingly numbers obsessed. The question is what format must those numbers be in [...]
The Beermat Business Case
Being able to build the business case for your solution is an important sales skill. However the traditional approach to developing the business case fails more often than it succeeds. To address this problem sellers need to start the business case conversation much earlier. They need to adopt ‘beermat’ business case principles because they can’t [...]
Why CPO’s Get Upset Watching The News
What you own you control, but big corporations no longer own large chunks of their production process, or supply chain. They are increasingly dependent on outside actors for their success and are vulnerable to a new array of risks as a result. Resilience and Risk Management Global supply chains mean that organizations are dependent on [...]
Show Me The Money! A Challenge Shared By Buyers & Sellers
Numbers are increasingly a part of today’s complex sale. Yet they can be troublesome, for buyers, as well as sellers. The Problem With Your Numbers Do you ever find yourself getting confused by the numbers in a sales pitch, or ROI calculator? Well, it happens more often than you might think. Every day buyers and [...]
Capturing Your Buyer’s Imagination
A sales person can provide the buyer with all the information in the world, but if the buyer can’t imagine the seller’s solution in their business there will be no sale. Capturing the buyer’s imagination is an important part of winning the sale. We traditionally associate imagination with poets, writers and artists, yet it plays [...]
Is The Buyer Struggling Unnecessarily With Your Pitch?
Many sellers are unknowingly doing things that make it harder, rather than easier for the buyer to buy. They are making simple mistakes that have the potential to turn a straight forward nod of the head from the buyer into a puzzled frown. As a result they are unnecessarily over-complicating and slowing progress towards a [...]
48 Shades Of Grey In Buying
What your buyer is thinking and how he, or she is feeling about the decision are two different things. As salespeople we need to focus on both. The Stereotype Of The Grey Buyer Buyers and in particular procurement professionals are stereotyped as being pale faced – grey suited bureaucrats. They are typically seen as analytical [...]
Selling To The Buyer’s Primary Ratio
Are you connecting with the number one metric used by CFOs and CEOs to measure business performance and to guide important decisions – including big purchases or investments? Here we will examine how talking ROCE with the buyer can boost your sales success. Return On Capital Employed The primary ratio is ROCE or Return On [...]
Justify With Numbers – Compel With Emotions
Fact sheets, spreadsheets and ROI calculators are vital sales tools, but they are not enough. The seller must tap into the buyer’s underlying buying motivations and emotions as well as connecting with the buyers logic and analysis to improve sales performance. Moving Beyond The Calculator In Selling In business, emotions are generally considered unhelpful at [...]
Bounded Rationality: Balancing Logic And Emotion In The Sale
Although organizations are increasingly structured and sophisticated in their buying, for as long as people are involved in making decisions there will inevitably be an element of human fallibility in terms of how decisions are made. This is the age of the Utilitarian or Economic buyer and the Cost-Benefit Analysis. Where decisions are made by [...]
Buyer OCD: The Obsession With Lowest Price
More and more buyers are being diagnosed with Price OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is causing increased anxiety even frustration among salespeople. Buyer OCD is a diagnosis offered by salespeople who are witnessing first hand the ongoing buyer obsession with price and the compulsive; price checking, competitive tendering and price re-negotiation, that accompanies it. [...]
Sellers: How To Calculate Your Value? – The Value Equation
Communicating your value to today’s hard-nosed buyers can be a real challenge. You know that your marketing literature won’t do it. You know that your sales pitches and proposals must. Price Versus Value Many buyers have an almost single-minded obsession with price. That makes moving the conversation off price and onto value the seller’s priority. But [...]
