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 the 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 pigeonholes 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, but 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 insight 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 purchasing the 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 then 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.

The box on page 32 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.