The Life and Death of Your Sales Deal: Customer Decision Process Demystified

If you’ve invested more than a few weeks in your career as a sales professional, you have stood there in
horror at least once. It’s a gut wrenching scene you see in slow motion.

There is your promising, diligently worked and professionally approached prospect holding your best deal.

As you uncap your pen, your prospect’s eyes suddenly glaze over and he lurches, sending the deal spiraling into a spinning propeller. After the buzzing and grinding stops, you swoop in, tenderly scoop up the still-smoking, barely-alive deal, and rush it to the Sales Order ER.

You tell yourself, “Hey, this deal is strong, it’s a fighter, it’s gonna make it, there’s still hope.”

Hours of massaging, therapy, and rebuilding immediately follow, consuming vast resources including large amounts of your credibility and most of your schedule.

Hooray. Your wounded deal is moved out of Intensive Care and can even walk again, limping into the final presentation.

Not so fast: At the presentation, your prospect makes an unexpected show of non-support and the deal lets out shriek, collapses, thrashing around, and staining your clothes. Sadly, your brave and cherished deal once again clings desperately to life, then loses its grip and dies.

All that remains are the expenses.

TIGI has been brought into the middle of these kinds of situations many times.

Misreading the Decision Process

A common problem that causes this deal death-spiral is a misread of the decision process.

The solution to this problem requires understanding the one basic process people go through when making a decision. Correctly reading the signs and signals indicating where you are in this process is, therefore, critical to your success.

This simple and general decision process has been validated, not only by years of field sales experience, but also by scientific research.

In the next section we will describe this process and provide you with the basic elements that will allow you to diagnose and treat the problems that cause the death spiral, or better yet, avoid the whole ordeal.

How people make decisions: the three decision rules.

People use three basic rules that structure the decision process. They are as follows:

First: Minimize regret and negative emotions

The first rule people have when they encounter a decision is to minimize regret or negative emotions.

No one wants to regret a decision. What’s more, people will work hard to avoid regretting a decision.

Think about the last time you considered, but didn’t buy something from a salesperson.

If you went through a presentation and didn’t buy, chances are your motivation not to buy came from fear of regret – you didn’t want to look back on the decision and think to yourself, “I did something stupid.”

What this means for your sales career is that people tend to avoid even promising solutions to their problems, because making a decision to do something opens up the possibility of regret resulting from making a bad decision. Once things get bad enough to motivate a change, i.e. the regret of not doing something is greater than the regret of doing the wrong thing; people approach the decision to buy emotionally, not rationally.

Three psychologists recently won the Nobel prize in Economics for a research program that demonstrated this simple fact: People do not make economic decisions based on rationality. They found that people are irrational and emotional when they are behaving normally. We know, therefore, that people behave this way when interacting with you as a salesperson.

Second: Go with what feels right

The second decision rule has a “Twist.”

When approaching a decision people engage the Goldilocks rule – where it feels “just right.” That is, while people want to make the “right” decision, they have limits on the time and energy they will spend on making sure that the decision is “right.”

This means the Goldilocks decision rule has people aiming for “good-enough.”

For example, think about buying a car.

People typically pick a handful of options, and then select the right one from there. No one looks at ALL the available options because doing so would take too much time and effort, and cost too much.

Instead, we try one and find it’s too hard, then the next one’s too soft, and then we find the one that’s just right. Every time, however, the option that is just right comes from a limited group of options.

Your customers do the same – they want to make the right decision, which means they work on getting to good-enough.

What’s more interesting about the Goldilocks decision rule is it involves a switch in thinking and behavior you can see. This is the Twist.

When using this rule, peoples’ decision-supports transform from emotional into rational, because making the right decision requires some facts, figures and detail. Once they twist into the rational side in their decision process, people become interested in the stuff most sales presentations are made of—features and benefits. They need information with an appropriate level of precision for note-taking.

Your customers who have made the twist are emotionally OK with the deal, and are less likely to head for the propeller with it, unless the facts and figures raise an emotional issue. The need to avoid this potential problem leads to the final decision rule.

Third: Build a justification with reasons

People are motivated to make decisions that are easy to justify. This decision rule unifies the emotional and rational components of the process. In general we believe in and value simple and straightforward explanations more than complicated reasons and explanations.

In the field you will notice this rule spring into action when a customer begins to repeat back your features and benefits in their own words.

They will say things like, “The shape of this widget is best for my hand, and meets my storage requirements,” after you have pointed out the ergonomics and efficient design of your widget. When you see this rule engage, it is often time to move to the close. Make sure that the customer’s paraphrase of your feature and benefit is not just a question for clarification, but is in fact a reason for buying.

All of us have had this rule activated after buying something we’re really excited about. The justification rule has a fairly long activity span, and you may recall demonstrating your new car’s cup-holders and trunk space to your friends long after the check was signed and you brought the car home.

By demonstrating the benefits of your new purchase, you were following this decision rule. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that you bought something you were excited about but were unable to describe why you bought it. So, when a customer can point to why they bought, they are following the justification rule.

The decision process in action.

These three decision rules come in order, beginning with an emotional phase followed by a rational phase.

As the first rule points out, decisions are made or avoided for emotional reasons. Most of the time people try to avoid negative emotions and regret when they have a problem they want to fix by ignoring the problem.

Second, once sufficiently motivated to do something about their situation, people look for a set of options and zoom in on what is “just right” or good enough within that group. During this process they twist into rational beings and begin to assemble the information needed to justify the decision.

Finally they take the next step and become able to justify their reasons for buying. If they can justify to themselves and others that this decision is a good one, they move ahead and buy.

You should be able to determine which mode your customer is in when they meet you, based on these three decision rules.

Remember, the reason for making a decision is originally emotional, so if you meet a prospect who is asking for a ton of information, facts, figures, features and specifications, you can safely assume they are justifying buying someone else’s solution.

Your job in this situation is to probe for the emotional reason motivating this decision process.

Additionally, prospects may even mimic the justification rule as they verbally repeat your features while mentally tallying your benefits up against an unseen list of features and benefits in their head.

DO NOT just give them the information they ask for without knowing the core emotional reason THEY WANT TO BUY YOU! – not your product! Otherwise, you might mistake their enthusiasm for a positive buying signal.

You might even forecast the deal, only to watch the prospect glaze over, begin to drift and then gain speed as your deal spirals toward a spinning propeller – buzz, grind, gasp, and nothing left but the expenses.