Why Must You Understand Buyer’s Buying Decisions?

Recently, many folks have found my Buying Facilitation™ Method to be a skill set they wish to add to their current sales techniques. As I speak with each one, I seem to have a similar discussion: folks seem to believe they need to understand how buyer’s buy. Surprising, even those who have read some of my books have the same takeaway.

Obviously, I’m not writing clearly enough or that wouldn’t be the takeaway. But that said, what is it that makes it so compelling for folks to believe that they need to understand buyer’s buying decisions?


In the Product Decision Funnel, it’s absolutely necessary to understand everything about the Identified Problem, the buyers, the users, how the product will be used, maintained, etc. But in the upper funnel – the Buying Decision Funnel – there is no way an outsider can understand what is going on. No way. Think about your parents for a moment. You lived with them for at least 17 years. Can you understand how they decide? How they resolved fights – or what took them so long to resolve a fight? There was something very private that went on: all people-systems have unique ways to work together to make decisions, to go through the change process, to remain in some sort of balance.

In all systems, when there is one single change, the entire system has to reconfigure itself. Even if an outsider understood ALL of the internal processes that went on when a system goes through change – and bringing in anything new is some sort of change no matter how small it is – there would be no way to influence it. In fact, insiders have a hard time influencing the change process.

So, sadly, sellers can never understand how buyers decide. And even if they do – which would be a miracle – they couldn’t do anything about it.

Stop trying to understand how buyers buy. Instead, use the Buying Facilitation™ Method to lead them through all of the systems issues they need to manage before they can do anything different. I have coded the way systems make decisions (at a systems level not at a content level) and all decisions get made the same way (read: Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions at www.buyingfacilitation.com) and using that sequence, along with Facilitative Questions, you can guide the customer through all of the internal decisions they need to make anyway (with you or without you) and thereby hasten the process and include you as a true Trusted Advisor.

But stop trying to understand. It wastes your time – and theirs.

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