How and Why Decision Making Drives Sales

When I talk with marketing people, they tell me that one of their hardest challenges is asking for the sale. Or, more specifically, asking prospects to make the decision to buy.

Why is this so tough? I think there are several reasons:

1. We're afraid to lose a prospect. If the prospect says "no," then we have lost them as a prospect (at least for a time) — which means we have one less person in our prospect bank. For many marketing and sales people, the prospect bank is a security blanket. The more people in the bank, the more secure they feel. We need to be careful that we don’t collect a lot of "china  eggs" in our prospect bank. "China eggs" are those porcelain eggs that look beautiful but have no nutritional value. It's better to have 20 really good prospects to focus our energies on than 100 china eggs that distract us from the good ones.

2. Many of us, have been taught not to ask. We were told as kids: “Before you ask, the answer is 'no'!”.  And so we concluded that, since the answer will be "no,"  why bother to ask? We need to remember that eventually we will get to the "yes." Remember when you really wanted something and you were persistent enough to keep asking, and it worked? Many of us just give up too soon.

3. We don’t like to make decisions ourselves. As a result,  we are reluctant to ask our prospect to make a decision. After all, shouldn’t we treat others the way we want to be treated? But it’s not a matter of our mistreating our prospects by asking them for a decision. We just need to know how to make decision making easier for them.

4. Sometimes we take a "no" personally. We feel like prospects who say "no" are rejecting us. Maybe we didn’t make a good enough presentation, maybe we didn’t ask enough questions, or maybe we didn’t look or act professional enough. 

Here are four factors that may help us understand the prospect's decision-making process:

1. Decision making is hard work. It's some of the hardest work in the world. When you ask a person to make a decision, you may be asking them to go to work and work harder than they have in a long time.

2. People have a tendency to put off hard work. The easiest way for a person to put off work in the sales process is to say "I want to think it over." In most cases the person is really saying “You haven’t given me enough of a reason to go to work and work as hard as I would have to work to make a decision.”

3. People do things for their reasons, not yours. What we may like most about our product or service maybe a drawback to some prospects. That is why it is important to spend time finding out what they want and what’s important to them. Remember: people don’t buy features, they buy benefits. It isn’t the one-inch drill bit they are buying, it is the one-inch hole.

4. Ask questions that will help people make a decision. For example, ask “Where do you want to go from here?” or “What do you see as the next step?” Develop some questions of your own that you can ask to help activate the final decision.

The bottom line? Above all, ask, and trigger the decision-making process. The worst that can happen is they say "no" — and they might even say "yes"!