CHAPTER 4

The Mechanics of Decision Making

In the first two chapters, we examined what selling really is, how you need to think about your selling process relative to the needs of your customer, and the primary motivation that drives the customer’s buying process.

Now let’s focus on some of the fundamental mechanics of customer decision making. Actually, there’s no reason to qualify it here by calling it “customer” decision making, because whether one is buying a car or deciding where to meet friends for dinner, the decision-making process is roughly the same.

We are all decision makers. As you read through this chapter, take a moment to think about how its lessons apply to you as well as to your selling. If you develop greater self-insight into how you make decisions, it will help you to become more sensitive and more attuned to the process your customers have to go through to make their decisions—which will increase the odds of positive outcomes for you.

As early as possible in your sales process with a customer, you need to understand whom you are selling to. This may sound a bit obvious. But I’m not referring to “whom” in the sense of a job title. I would expect you to know that the decision maker is the owner, CEO, vice president of ops, or engineering manager.

When I ask “whom” you are selling to, I want you to tell me which type of decision maker you are interacting with. It can make a significant difference in how you sell if you know to “whom” you are selling.

Let me explain. Every one of your customers falls into one of two broad categories of decision maker: a satisficer (pronounced “sa-tis-fys-er”) or a maximizer. I did not make that up! Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Carnegie Mellon, first coined these terms based on research he conducted back in the 1950s.

You need to understand which type of decision maker your prospects are because it influences how you’re going to sell to them—or whether you’ll even choose to sell to them. You also need to understand which category of decision maker you fall into because this can influence how you sell.

Satisficers make a decision or take action once their basic decision criteria are met. Satisficers are people who make the classic good-enough decision. They are prospects who will buy from the first seller who satisfactorily provides the information they need to make a purchase decision.

Satisficers will make their decision once they’ve gathered a certain minimum amount of information because in their minds there’s not a big enough ROI to justify the investment of additional time or effort to keep researching their options. Satisficers make decisions and don’t look back. Typically they experience less buyer’s remorse because they don’t stress about whether they’ve made the absolutely best decision. They made the decision that was good enough to meet their requirements and to achieve their objectives.

Maximizers are decision makers who can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every possible alternative and are convinced that they’ve made the best possible choice. Research shows that maximizers do indeed make the best decisions. Somewhat ironically, but not unexpectedly, they are also more likely to be unhappy with their decision than a satisficer. Why? Because maximizers always worry that they may have overlooked something, that there was some better option that they neglected to consider.

Now let’s do a quick exercise to find out if you are a satisficer or maximizer. I’d like you to think back to the last car you purchased or leased. After you conducted your initial research online, how many dealerships did you visit before you made your purchase/lease decision?

One or two dealerships? Good work! You are a satisficer. You decided that the marginal return on the investment of additional hours of your time to visit yet another dealer just wasn’t worth it. The information you had already gathered was good enough to feel comfortable making your decision.

Three or more dealerships? I hesitate to label you, but you’re probably a maximizer. You can be comforted by the fact that at the end of the day you likely bought a car that met all of your decision criteria. The trade-off was that you spent a lot more of your limited time searching for the best possible car for your needs. And I suspect you probably woke up in the middle of the night to kick yourself for not waiting a few months to see what next year’s model offered.

A 2012 National Automobile Dealers Association survey found that the average car buyer visited 1.2 dealers prior to making a purchase decision. We can safely extrapolate from this information that most people tend to fall more on the satisficer end of the spectrum than on the maximizer end. (We rarely are all one type or the other. People can be satisficers for some decisions and maximizers for others.)

So when you look at this in terms of your customer mix—and I’ll teach more about buyer qualification later in the book—you have to keep in mind that every buyer you work with will fall into one of these two categories. You need to determine which type you are working with in the early stages of your qualification process.

How are you supposed to determine which category they’re in? Just ask them. For instance, ask about a previous decision they’ve made. If you’re talking to them about selling a replacement to an existing product, then ask the decision maker about the decision-making process they went through on the original purchase (the number of vendors they talked to, their internal process, and the length of the decision cycle). That will give you a strong indication of which type of decision maker you are dealing with.

This knowledge of your customer should have an impact on your selling. The satisficer will be open to making a faster decision. If you can be responsive (see Chapter 10 for a full description of responsiveness) to satisficers and quickly provide them the information that meets their minimum requirements for making a purchase decision, then you can dramatically increase your chances of winning their business. In dealing with a satisficer, the speed of your selling is very important.

The speed of your selling is critical to maximizers as well. Maximizers may want to evaluate every alternative that exists, but the fact is that they don’t have any more time than satisficers to complete their buying process. The keys for selling to these decision makers are immediate responsiveness and proactive transparency. One difficulty in selling to maximizers is that they evaluate so many different options that they may have a hard time remembering you. This means you have to create clear differentiation by quickly and completely responding to a maximizer’s need for specific information. This will make your selling memorable.

Another way to help a maximizer move more quickly through the buying process is what I call proactive transparency. For instance, if you have six competitors on a deal, create a complete, unbiased competitive matrix featuring all six of their products (as well as your own) and present it to the prospect. This is a trust builder, a differentiator, and potentially a memorable time saver for the prospect.

By contrast, depending on the nature of the business you are in and the products you offer, you may want to steer clear of maximizers. If you have a quick-turn product, something that typically sells after just one or two sales calls, then you should consider whether you would be better off letting your competitors spend their limited time selling to the maximizers.

Lastly, examine how your own buying behavior affects your selling. If you’re a maximizer, for instance, then you’ll need to be very careful about selling to another maximizer. One of my clients is a company that sells a technical product to customers in the Silicon Valley area, many of whom, as you might expect, are detailed-oriented engineers with maximizer tendencies. One of the client’s salespeople, Earl, was himself a maximizer. Earl reveled in long, detailed discussions with his customers about the technical attributes of his products. Naturally, he attracted maximizer customers. The result was that Earl didn’t have the time to support more than just a few prospects, and the length of time they took to make their decision was more than double the time that satisficer prospects required with other salespeople. Needless to say, Earl wasn’t making his number.

There’s a lot of research on the mental process people go through to make a decision to buy something. Let me boil it down to five key points that you must keep in mind as you formulate your sales strategies:

1. When people make a decision, they follow a process with a certain number of steps. Marketing people like to talk about four steps in the decision-making process using the acronym AIDA: awareness, interest, desire, action. IBM used to train their sales team in The 5-Call Close.

2. People move sequentially through the steps of their decision-making process. Imagine that you are in the Olympics, competing in the men’s 110-meter hurdles. As you lower yourself into the starting blocks, you look down the straightaway of the track and see stretched out before you ten hurdles that you need to clear before you reach the finish line. If you want to win the race, you have to leap over each hurdle in order. You can’t decide to hurdle only the even-numbered barriers and then go back for the odd-numbered ones.

2. Decision makers don’t skip a step in their process. You are back in the Olympic hurdle competition again. You can’t decide to skip hurdle number seven and still win the competition. There are no shortcuts in the decision-making process.

3. Each step in the decision-making process is associated with certain information requirements. This means that each step of the process contains questions that need to be answered.

4. Customers will not move from the current step in their decision-making process to the next until their questions have been answered.

These rules apply to satisficers and maximizers alike. However, there will be differences in how they apply them. Satisficers may have fewer steps in their decision-making process and will likely have fewer questions that need to be answered at each step. Maximizers may require more detailed information before feeling comfortable moving to the next step in their process. As I stressed earlier, be sure to identify the decision-maker type early in your qualification.

Let’s look at how some of these points apply to your selling. Think back to a sales situation with a good prospect when the sales cycles suddenly and unexpectedly became flabby and stretched out. When a sales cycle slows or veers off course, a salesperson’s first tendency is to point the finger of blame at the buyer. After all, isn’t it always the customer who’s the culprit when the sales cycle stalls? No. In fact, the opposite is true. When the buyer stops making progress toward closing an order, it’s nearly always the seller’s fault. Why?

If you aren’t providing your prospect with the information she needs to move on to the subsequent step in her decision-making process, then the buying cycle will screech to a halt. If the deal you’re working on suddenly loses momentum, before you begin pointing a finger at the customer, take a look in the mirror. You need to quickly engage with the customer to determine what’s needed from you to satisfy the information requirements for the current step of the buying cycle and to get your sales cycle back on track.

Let’s say that you’re working on a sales opportunity that has just one competitor. Suddenly the deal slows down, and you’re stuck on step two. The customer is waiting for you to respond to a question you were asked in an e-mail two days ago. The customer needs to consider your response before moving on to the next step. Unfortunately for you, your competitor didn’t miss a beat, quickly answering the question on the very day it was received. Now your very good, very qualified prospect is working on step three of the evaluation and decision-making process with your competitor while you’re spinning your wheels on step two (and you probably haven’t even asked the customer why). Ouch! Don’t let that happen to you.