How and why your customers buy

By Edward DiMingo

Corporate America spends millions of dollars and thousands of hours teaching their salespeople how to sell, and not a cent or minute on how and why their customers buy.

Teaching salespeople how to sell is an important business activity, of course, but such instruction can never be truly meaningful unless both the teacher and the student understand the mechanics of a customer's purchase.

Those mechanics are explained below, and the points we make hold true for product and service buys in both the consumer and business-to-business worlds, from bargain basement cheap items to very expensive ones.

Hot buttons
The decision to purchase something--anything--starts off with emotion doing all the buyer's thinking and talking. Hot buttons are the emotions that get pushed when the buyer's needs collide head-on with the product's benefits .

Hot buttons are unique to each person and each person reacts differently based on what makes him or her feel good. A master salesperson, knowing that pushing the right ones gives him a competitive edge that can result in a sale, identifies what's important to the buyer first and then customizes the product/benefits sales pitch to hone right in on those hot buttons.

For sellers, the essence of marketing and selling is understanding why your target market makes the choices they make in purchasing your products or services. If this is not understood by your marketing and sales teams, then sales are probably going to competitors who do understand it.

Early awareness pays off
The process of buying something can begin a few minutes or many months before the actual transaction takes place. If a buyer is already familiar with the product and views it favorably, together with the company that produced it, then the item is likely to find its way onto his "short list" early on. That's a great advantage for the product/producer to have over the competition.

The rule is: Buyers can't buy a product if they don't know it exists, they can't buy from a company if they don't know what it makes--and they won't buy from a company if they don't trust what it says or how it does business.

This simple rule explains why billions of dollars are spent by companies every year on producing marketing tools that create awareness of and interest in their products, position those products effectively both in the market and in the minds of buyers, and cultivate a strong, credible corporate image that facilitates subsequent product sales.

Choices count
After identifying and expressing interest in two or three or four products that represent the possible solution he's looking for (the "short list"), the buyer begins to think his way through the process more rationally in order to make an intelligent decision. ROI purchase justifications are commonplace in the big-ticket b2b world, where bad decisions can get a buyer fired.

In the Internet Age, people have options, not only of the products they can buy, but also how they can buy them and how they can have them delivered. Buyers frequently do competitive comparisons of the products they're considering. For small inexpensive items, the comparison may be a quick mental run-through, but for large b2b purchases, the product comparison is usually done in writing, evaluating and quantifying in detail the performance, price and benefits of each product versus the others.

During this phase of the purchase, it's especially important for the product manufacturer to have available for the buyer all the necessary collaterals, performance specs, service and warranty statements, and any other information that makes its product favorably stand above those it's competing against. By enabling the buyer to distinguish this one product from all the others, the information helps him decide intelligently in its favor.

Trial
A purchase is influenced by a buyer's prior experience with the product. People tend to buy those brands they've had success with in the past and to steer clear of those that flunked the test of real-world experience. If the product is new to a buyer, the purchase is often influenced by positive word-of-mouth from others who've used it.

Favorable word-of-mouth is the singlemost influential communications tool--because it comes from credible people the buyer knows, believes and trusts.

And it follows that the ultimate purpose of marketing communications is to create favorable word-of-mouth, so sellers should always be on the lookout for customer tie-ins, testimonials and endorsements to use in your marketing materials. If nothing succeeds like success, then success stories can go a long way in helping you sell--and helping customers buy--your products.

Purchase
At the time of purchase, reason usually prevails over emotion (but not necessarily). A specific decision to purchase a specific product is made specifically when the buyer has, in this order:

• A need to fill and willingness to fill it.
• Money necessary to fill that need.
• The belief that the value he or she is getting from the product (benefit) is greater than the value he or she is giving back to the seller (money).

After the deal is done
There is also a certain amount of rationalizing after a purchase, especially expensive ones, when a feeling of disharmony or discomfort (cognitive dissonance) sets in over whether the purchase was the right thing to do or whether the right deal was struck.

As a friendly gesture, it's important for the seller to do some follow-up. A simple telephone call, e-mail or letter can go a long way toward reassuring the buyer that he did the right thing. Such letters usually begin: "Company XYZ wishes to thank you for your recent purchase of a (product) . We believe our product is the best available on the market to give you the solution you're looking for."

You probably get your share of these letters and should consider sending similar ones to customers, if possible, following a purchase from your company. These letters are not just a way of saying thank you or overcoming cognitive dissonance, but most importantly they are tools for you to help each customer take the first step toward the next purchase from your company.

In conclusion
Now comes the big question: How well do you know your company's customers? If you can't sit down and write out their specific motivations, then it may be time to reach out and ask them directly.

You can do this with a simple questionnaire (8-10 questions) in a small customer focus group, or a customer telephone survey, or even a website survey. The last, very easy to do and very effective in generating response, only requires you to put the survey questionnaire on your website and set up a small database program that enables customers to respond easily--through the website--without having to do the work of writing out answers.

As part of our own client relationship building, jldcreative has used the website survey as a tool for better understanding the companies we do business with. Rate of response was extremely high (37%), and the information our clients gave us has been invaluable in helping us plan our offering around answers to the questions of how and why they buy marketing communications services from us.