Why People Buy

“Why are all these people lining up to give me so much money?”

That was the title I put on a sales program I wrote years ago. It was meant to be a little cheeky, and it was also a real question. I had watched some salespeople have customers practically line up for them while others, with the same product and the same price list, could not get a return phone call. Same product. Same market. Completely different results. Why?

The answer I found was that the good ones understood why people buy, and the rest were busy explaining what they sell. Those are two different jobs. Before we get into conversations, meetings and closing in the lessons that follow, I want to give you the three ideas that everything else in this track rests on. They are simple to say and they take a lifetime to fully use.

The map is not the territory

Every customer walks in carrying a map of the world in their head. It has their past purchases on it, the contractor who ripped off their brother-in-law, the restaurant that gave them food poisoning once, the price they think a kitchen remodel “should” cost. That map is their own drawing of reality, and it is the only map they have, and they make every decision by looking at it, not at your brochure.

So when a customer says your price is too high, you are hearing a fact about their map, and only partly about your price. When they say “I need to think about it,” you are hearing where the roads on their map run out. The salesperson who argues with the map loses. The salesperson who gets curious about the map, who asks where that number came from and what happened last time, gets to help redraw it.

This also applies to you. You have a map too, and on it your product is obviously worth the money. Of course it is; you drew the map. Have you ever noticed how puzzled you get when a customer does not see what is so plain to you? That puzzlement is the gap between two maps. The work is closing the gap, and it starts with admitting yours is a map as well.

Experience has a structure

The second idea is that the way people decide is not random. It feels random from the outside, because one person buys on the spot and another takes three weeks, one wants every specification and another only wants to know you will show up on time. But each of them is running a pattern, and the pattern repeats. The person who took three weeks with you took three weeks with the last contractor too.

Once you accept that buying has a structure, you can stop taking it personally and start paying attention. How does this person take in information? What did they ask first? What did they not ask at all? What did they need to feel before they could say yes? I have sat with owners who could tell me everything about their product and nothing about how their last ten customers actually decided. That is like knowing every ingredient in your kitchen and never having watched anyone eat.

A lot of buying decisions are emotional and then get explained with reasons afterward. Everything a person does is based on a belief of some kind. Your job is to find the belief that is already there and speak to it. A homeowner who believes “good contractors are hard to find” is looking for evidence that the search is over, and the cheapest bid will not give them that.

If one person can do it, anyone can learn it

This is the idea that keeps the other two from becoming depressing. The salespeople with the line out the door were not born that way. When I researched them for that program, we went as far as asking how they practiced when they started out. They had practiced. They had failed, plenty, and instead of calling it failure they had called it feedback and adjusted. Selling was my own laboratory for years, and I got most of it wrong before I got any of it right.

If you are a plumber, an electrician, a chiropractor or a landscaper who “is not a salesperson,” I want you to hear this clearly. Selling is a skill with a structure, like anything else you have learned. You did not come out of the womb knowing how to sweat a pipe or balance a ledger either. If someone in your trade sells well, that skill can be broken into pieces and learned. The rest of this track is those pieces.

Start with your last purchase

Think about the last thing you bought that was not routine, and groceries and gas do not count. Write down your answers to these: Why did I buy it? What did I assume it would do for me? Where did I get that information, and who gave it to me? Was I making a well-informed decision, or did I decide and then gather reasons? The person buying from you is running through the very same questions, mostly in silence.

What it takes

That is an hour of honest thinking, and it costs nothing. The harder part is doing the same exercise for your last five customers. If you do not know how they decided, that is a week of asking them casually, over the phone or at the counter, and that is free too.

What map is your typical customer carrying when they first call you? And who in your trade sells better than you, and what do they do that you have not yet learned?