Weekly Sales Tips: Sales and the Science of Decision Making

How does your customer make a decision? Well, it turns out they don’t. They don’t make a single decision, that is, they make a series of decisions that all lead up to the final decision.

For example, you’re thinking about purchasing a whole-house entertainment system. What are the decisions that you need to make? To begin with, you can spend a little, or you can spend a lot. How much do the component pieces cost? What do they look like? What’s my budget? How extensive do I want this system to be? Do I care about the brand name? How easy will it be to install? Can I do it myself?

This is an important conversation because at the core it speaks to the state of either anxiety or relaxation in your customer’s brain. A relaxed brain is more likely to say “yes,” but a confused mind definitely says “no.” Part of our task, when we’re working with a customer, is to get them into a relaxed frame of mind. It’s so much easier to make a decision when you’re not completely stressed out about a thousand issues that surround the decision. Remember, this isn’t just one decision. It’s a thousand decisions along the way.

If we’re not helping our customers to make decisions all along the way, it’s going to lead to confusion. Because by the time it’s time to make a final decision, what I have to do then is aggregate all of those small decisions and make them all at the same time in order to have them bubble up into one final decision.

In other words, if you ask me to buy it, I have to stand there and say, “Well, is this the right price? And are these the right components? And is this the right brand? And do I trust the salesperson? And how much do I have to learn?” I have to make all those decisions at the same time. That’s really hard. Not only is it hard, but it’s confusing. Remember what we said? A confused mind says, “no.”

I want you to think about the product you sell and just ask yourself this question: What are the most important sub-decisions that your customer has to make? How can you help them to do that? You want to think of the sales process as if you’re building a case. As you’re building the case, you need the customer to see the points of evidence all along the way, very, very clearly. It’s as if you’re trying to convince a jury.

Here’s the motive, does that make sense? Here’s the opportunity, does that make sense? It’s the same thing in a sales presentation; we’re trying to break down the sale into component parts and get the customer to agree with us a little bit at a time.

I could also think of it as if I’m trying to cross a river by jumping from boulder to boulder, all along the way. Each of those boulders represents a sub-decision. If I miss a boulder, I’m going to be all wet. We want to think about making it easy for our customers to do what they already want to do.

What are you doing to break down your sales presentation into those smaller decisions?

Remember, your customer makes decisions based on emotions, and that emotion is going to guide them the best when they are in a relaxed frame of mind; when they are experiencing peace. How do we get there? By making the decisions easy because we’re deciding just a little bit at a time.

What are you doing to make it easy for your customer to do what they want to do anyway?

If you like what we’re doing here in 5MST, we’re doing a lot more over at Sales365, our free community for sales professionals. Check it out at sales365.io or download directly from your app store. Come join the conversation. 

Until next time, learn more, to earn more!


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About the Author: Jeff Shore

Jeff Shore is the Founder and CEO of Shore Consulting, Inc. a company specializing in psychology-based sales training programs. Using these modern, game-changing techniques, Jeff Shore’s clients delivered over 145,000 new homes generating $54 billion in revenue last year.