101 Best sales and marketing Ideas
IDEA 84:
NOT JUST LOGICAL
People need a reason to buy. Especially with technical or complex products, and certainly in areas of industrial and business-to-business purchasing, buyers make logical decisions. They weigh up the evidence and see how something stacks up. They compare one supplier with another. But it is not just logical factors that influence their final decision. What else is involved?
Idea
From world-famous Harvard Business School…
Some years ago Harvard Business School carried out research with top US buyers to ascertain how much logic and how much emotion was involved in buying decisions. To many people’s surprise the result showed that 84 per cent of all buying decisions are based on emotion. Certainly if someone is purchasing something like a wedding gift, or a wedding dress for that matter, one would expect there to be some emotion involved – perhaps a lot. But what about say a heat exchanger, or a fork-lift truck, or a machine lathe: surely not?
But it is a fact: emotion does matter, and it matters particularly when the package of more technical matters in evidence is evenly balanced between competitors. If there is apparently not much to choose between two (or more) technical cases, people will search for something else that they can use to swing the balance; and the deciding factor can then become emotional. They choose the product because the sales person selling it remembers their birthday, gets on best with them, makes a point of recognizing that they are pressed for time, or any of a hundred and one little things that make an impression and appeal.
In practice
- Never underrate what may seem to be peripheral factors; indeed you can do worse than to seek some out, especially when you judge that a decision is a finely balanced one.
- For example, if there are a dozen books on the shelf under the heading “Sales”, the cover of the one you choose may suddenly become disproportionately important to your choice. That’s why I worry about the blurb for something like this volume. It’s a common principle.