The Human Side of Selling

By thomas v. bonoma

Although many companies’ selling efforts are models of marketing efficiency, many well-planned and executed selling strategies fail because management has an incomplete understanding of buying psychology – the human side of selling.

How can psychology be used to improve sales to major accounts? My contention is that seller awareness of and attention to the human factors in purchasing will produce higher sales and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Different buying psychologies exist that make effective selling difficult. On one hand, companies don’t buy, people do, and price doesn’t sell, people do. On the other hand, many individuals, some of whom may be unknown to the seller, are involved in most major purchases. Even if all parties to a “decision-making unit” are known, the outcome of their interaction may be unpredictable and based solely on knowledge of them as individuals. Effective selling requires combining the individual and group dynamics of buying to predict what the decision-making unit will do. For this combination to be practical, the selling company must first find the answers to four key questions.

1. Who’s in the “Buying Center”?

Each party in the buying process has subtle roles and needs. Buyers can assume a set of different roles regardless of the product or number of participants in the purchase decision. These roles can be thought of as behavioral pigeon holes into which different managers from different functions can be placed to aid understanding. Together, the buying managers who take on these roles can be considered as a “buying center.”

The various buying roles that each one plays include:

The Initiator: The person or persons who recognize that some company problem can be solved or avoided by acquiring a product or service.

The Gatekeeper: One or more people, who may have the title of buyer or purchasing manager, who control (literally keeping the gate open or shut) information and vendor access to corporate decision makers. Gatekeepers largely determine which vendors get the chance to sell.

The Influencers: Those people who “have a say” in whether a purchase is made and about what is bought. For example, there are a wide variety of influencers in a business jet sale, ranging from members of the board of directors to maintenance mechanics.

The Deciders: Those who say “yes” or “no” to the contemplated purchase. Although managers often act together to carry out the decider role, one of them often will become champion or advocate of the contemplated purchase and move it to completion. Without such a champion, many purchases would never be made.

Deciders often do not “sign off” on purchases, nor do they make them. That is left to others. Signers, however, often represent themselves as deciders. Such representation can be deceptive. It is possible for a vendor with a poor feel for the buying center to never become aware of the real movers in the buying company.

The Purchaser and The User:

Those concerned respectively, with obtaining and consuming the product or service. The corporate purchasing department usually fills the purchaser role. Who fills the user role depends on the product or service.

In more important buying situations, the number of managers assuming these fixed roles increases. In a recent study of 62 capital equipment purchases (Wesley J. Johnston and Thomas V. Bonoma), the typical purchase involved an average of four departments and three levels of management hierarchy. Seven different persons filled the six buying roles. As might be expected, the more complex and involved the buying decision, the larger the decision unit and the more careful it is in making decisions.

2. What’s Their Power Base?

As useful as the buying-center concept is, it is difficult to apply because managers do not wear tags that say “decision maker” or “unimportant person.” The powerful are often invisible at least to vendor representatives. For example, a “lowly” mechanic can become an influencer and may be able to stop a purchase or hinder its completion. Sales efforts cannot be directed through a simple reading of organizational charts; the selling company must identify the powerful buying-center members.

In any organization you can identify five major power bases from which the members of a decision-making unit try to draw their influence.

Reward power refers to a manager’s ability to encourage purchases by providing others with monetary, social, political or psychological benefits.

Coercive power refers to a manager’s ability to impose punishment on others. Of course, threatening punishment is not the same thing as having the power to impose it.

Attraction power refers to a person’s ability to charm or otherwise persuade people to go along with his preferences.

Expert power refers to a manager’s ability to get others to go along with his judgment because of real or perceived expertise.

Status power comes from having a high position in the corporation. This notion of power is most akin to what is meant by authority. It’s not really the same as reward power or coercive power. For example, in one small company, an important factor is whether the manager arguing a position is a member of the founding family – a kind of status power and attraction power rolled into one.

The key to improved selling effectiveness is through observation and investigation to understand prospects’ corporate power culture. The sales team must learn the type of power key managers in the buying company have and how they can use their power to positively or negatively influence the final buying decision.

3. What Do They Want?

Diagnosing motivation accurately is one of the easiest management tasks to do poorly and one of the most difficult to do well. Most managers have lots of experience at diagnosing another’s wants, though the admission is difficult in coming, most are just not very accurate when trying to figure out what another person wants and will do. A basic rule of motivation is as follows: all buyers act selfishly or try to be selfish but sometimes miscalculate and don’t serve their own interests. Thus, buyers attempt to maximize their gains and minimize their losses from purchase situations. How do buyers choose in their own self-interest? The following points, obtained from research, give insights into that decision making process:

First, buyers act as if a complex product or service were separated into various benefits.

Second, buyers segment the potential benefits into various categories. The most common of these are financial, product service, social-political, and personal.

Finally, buyers ordinarily are not certain the purchasing product will actually bring the desired benefit. Because benefits have value only if they actually are delivered, the buyer must be confident that the selling company will keep its promises. Well-known vendors may have some advantage over lesser-known companies in this respect.

Outlining the buyer’s motivation suggests several possible selling approaches. The vendor can try to focus the buyer’s attention on benefits that are not part of his or her thinking. A magazine sales representative, for instance, devised a questionnaire to help convince an uncertain client to buy advertising space. The questionnaire sought information about the preferred benefits – in terms of reach, audience composition, and cost per thousand readers. When the prospective buyer “played this silly game” and filled out the questionnaire, he convinced himself of the superior worth of the vendor’s magazine on the very grounds he was seeking to devalue it. Conversely, sellers can deemphasize the buyer’s desire for benefits on which the vendor’s offering stacks up poorly. For example, if a competing vendor’s jet offers better fuel economy, the selling company might attempt to refocus the buyer’s attention toward speed at lower maintenance costs.

Finally, vendors often try to change what the buyer wants, or which class of benefits he or she responds to most strongly. My view of motivation suggests that such an approach is almost always unsuccessful. Selling strategy needs to work with the buyer’s motivations, not around them.

4. How Do They Perceive Us?

How buyers perceive the selling company, its products, and its personnel is very important to efficient selling. Powerful buyers invariably have a wide range of perceptions about a vending company.

A simple scheme for keeping tabs on how buyers perceive sellers is to ask salespeople to estimate how the important buyers judge the vending company and its actions, and to categorize these judgments as positive, neutral or negative. The resulting judgment should be shared with the sales manager and marketing manager of the selling company. The scarcity of marketing dollars and effectiveness of champions in the buying process speak strongly for focusing resources where they are likely to do the most good. Marketing efforts should aim at those in the buying company who like the selling company, since they are partially presold. While there is no denying the adage, “It’s important to sell everybody,” those who diffuse their efforts this way often sell no one.

Gathering Psychological Intelligence

Sales call planning is not only a matter of minimizing sales costs, but of determining what intelligence is needed about key buyers and what questions or requests are likely to produce that information. I recently traveled with a major account representative of a duplication equipment company, accompanying him on the five calls he made during the day. None of the visits yielded even 10 percent of the potential psychological or other information that the representative could use on future calls, despite the fact that prospects made such information available repeatedly.

Exhibit one shows a matrix that can be used to capture on a single sheet of paper essential psychological data about a major customer. Gathering psychological information about buyers is more often a matter of listening carefully than of asking clever questions during the sales interview.

Key selling assessments involve (1) isolating the powerful buying-center members, (2) identifying what they want in terms of both their hot buttons and specific needs, and (3) assessing their perceptions of the situation.

Having techniques for acquiring sales intelligence and attending to reports is not enough. Sales management must stress that the company rewards careful fact gathering, tight analysis, and impeccable execution. This message is most meaningful when it comes from the top.

A Final Note

The group that influences a purchase doesn’t call itself a buying center. Nor do decision-makers and influencers think of themselves in those terms. Managers and salespeople must be careful not to mistake the analysis and ordering process for the buyers’ actions themselves.

Finally, sellers must understand buying, just as buyers must understand selling. When that happens, psychology and marketing begin to come together usefully. Closed sales follow almost as an afterthought.

Major Sales Strategic Profile

Who’s in the buying center?

John Smith-
plant manager

Nancy Reimer-
purchasing mgr.

Frank Baum-
oper. engineer

Paul Drake-
comptroller

Herb Wallace-
exec. vice president

“Lucky” Cogliano-
operator

What role do they play?

Initiator

Gatekeeper

Influencer User

Influencer

Decider

Influencer

What’s their power base?

Reward Power

Attraction Power

Expert Power

Status Power

(Pres.’ son-in-law)

Status Power

Coercive

What do they want?

High Quality

Ease of Operation

Detailed specifications

High discount

Advanced design

Good maintenance

Low Cost

Extended Warranty

Simple operation

Comfort in handling

Added prestige

Ease of operation

Comfort

How do they see us?

Best in field

Capable Service

Aggressive marketers

Over priced

Advanced Technology

Weak in service

High priced

Good reputation

Unknown

Threat of change

Poor Maintenance features

Selling Strategy