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Anatomy Of A Buying Decision

Guest post by: David Flannery

Article Overview: Before your prospect makes the decision to buy your product or service, four decisions must be made. For the most part these decisions will be made inside their heads or in conjunction with others depending on whether it is a joint decision making process or not. In small to medium sized businesses one person may make the buying decision, but in larger companies it is usual for the decision be made by a group of people. Whatever the amount of people involved in the buying decision, the same four decisions must be answered.

Anatomy Of A Buying Decision

Before your prospect makes the decision to buy your product or service, four decisions must be made. For the most part these decisions will be made inside their heads or in conjunction with others depending on whether it is a joint decision making process or not. In small to medium sized businesses one person may make the buying decision, but in larger companies it is usual for the decision be made by a group of people.

Whatever the amount of people involved in the buying decision, the same four decisions must be answered.

Each of the decisions come under four headings:

1. Action

2. Course

3. Resources

4. Source

Action Decision: " Do We Have To Buy Something Right Now?"



This question is all about urgency. How bad is the problem to be solved and how fast do we need it fixed? If the problem is not urgent then in all likelihood there will be no sale. If the problem is urgent a sale will be made...to someone

Course Of Action Decision: " What Should We Buy?"

Once the decision that action must be taken the next issue is... options. Just like there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to solve problem. This question is all about " OK, what options to we have to solve this problem, and which option is the best?"

Resources Decision: " Can We Afford To Buy?"

This question is all about " OK, we have chosen our best option, now can we afford to buy it?" Before your prospect can buy something they must have the money,or be able to get the money, to buy it. If your customer is a business or a company they will also look at the resources for using your product in terms of time, manpower, extra training etc.

Source Decision: " Who Will We Buy From?"

Once a prospect decides that they have to buy something right now, knows what they are going to buy, and can pay for it, the next decision to be made is " who will we buy from?".

The four decisions depend on each other and if a no decision is made at any point a sale will not occur. So, what can you do as a salesperson to get the sale to happen and happen in your favour... good question...read on!

The course of action that most salespeople will take is to try to influence the source decision, that is to show the prospect why they should buy from them. The salespeople who end up doing that are also the one's that find out, after wasting time, that the prospect would buy from them, but "call back in six months when we are ready" (action decision..no urgency), " It sound great but we can't afford it" (resource decision)...etc.

In order to win the sale, you must influence all four buying decisions, how do you do that? It's all about questions...

1. Create and Establish Urgency



Urgency sells! Urgency creates action! Remember the action decision question is " Do We Have To Buy Something Right Now?" . So the best way to make your prospect realise that he needs to take action is to create a sense of urgency! To do that, you can do things like ask questions to help them discover opportunities to improve their existing condition and then ask "When" questions to find out how quickly the problem needs to be solved. If there is no internal urgency to get the problem solved there will, most likely, be no sale.

2. Establish Motive

Ask "Why" questions to find out why solving this problem is so important to the prospect.

3. Establish Consequences



Ask "What if" questions to establish the consequences of not solving the problem. Consequence question are a great all rounder for creating action.

As a salesperson, the only decision you can't influence directly is the resource decision, but your companies strategic pricing should put you in a position to give options based on perceived value.

The buying decision process and the ways to influence it applies whether you are selling one on one in a retail sales or insurance sales situation right up to selling to the C-level or board of directors of a big mufti-national.

© 2010, Profit Growth Dynamics International. All rights reserved.

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Article Tags: buying, buying decision, decision making process, medium sized businesses, prospect, sales, sales success



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