How Easy (or Difficult) Do You Make Your Customer’s Buying Decision?

“Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.” – Adam Alter, PhD, New York University Stern School

Here’s the short version of Dr. Alter’s decision-making rationale: easy equals right.

Top sales performers make it easy for customers to understand their product, and thus, create an easy pathway to a purchase decision.

But the more difficult the concept, or the more intricate the product or the issues, the more likely it is that your customer’s brain will lock up.

Psychologists refer to this as cognitive fluency (or disfluency). Cognitive fluency measures how easy it is for your customer to think about something, to grasp a concept and to make a decision.

Suppose you are considering investing in the stock market for the first time. You believe stocks are a good idea and you have the funds to invest, but the process is completely befuddling. You don’t know which stocks to buy and you don’t understand the acquisition process.

Let’s assume you speak with a stockbroker who holds strong opinions about your stock selections and a thorough understanding of how the process works. Let’s also assume that this stockbroker has no concept of the delicate nature of cognitive fluency.

He begins to share his opinion about a number of hot stocks, all for companies you have never heard of.

He suggests you also consider derivatives, blended mutuals, and foreign currency. He tells you that dollar-cost averaging is the way to go but never explains what that is. He quotes the EBITDA of a tech start up and the P/E ratio of an oil company.

And then your head explodes.

The cognitive strain is so great that you hit the abort button and tell him you just remembered you left the oven on at home as you run from his office. See ya!

If you want to make it easy for your customer to buy, you must understand and embrace the need for cognitive fluency.

The best way to do this is to recognize that your customer will make their decisions based on stories. Not stories you tell, but stories they tell themselves.

Every prospect needs to adopt a firm rationalization (story) for why they chose one company or product over another.

Customers find ease in simplicity. Your job is to provide that for them.

For example, in the 1990’s I sold new construction townhomes on a site where the soil had been heavily contaminated. The remediation was massive and the soil engineering was exceedingly complex.

We had volumes of material which explained the cleanup process, the current condition, and the ongoing testing—all of it highly technical and written by engineers or attorneys (not exactly light bedtime reading).

I made it much simpler for the customer to understand by telling my prospects this: “Our soil is clean enough for your child to eat.”

Now, that might seem like a bizarre way to look at things, but consider the cognitive ease it provided.

My statement gave customers a real life measurement they could easily relate to and which very quickly explained (and put into proper perspective) an otherwise complex situation.

Think for a moment about the cognitive strain your customer goes through.

What issues do they feel confused about?

What situations inspire that blank look of total confusion on their face?

Now, try to imagine some very simple stories which will help them understand those complex issues in a concise and relatable way.

Consider these examples:

“Here is our rule-of-thumb for standing behind our product: If it breaks during normal use, we’ll fix it.”

“The motto in our manufacturing plant is ‘sweep the corners.’  Our attention to detail includes even the things most people never see.”

“We are not here simply to serve you; we want to eventually do business with your children, as well.”

What stories can you provide for your customer?

Increase their cognitive fluency, and you will change their world.