The Mind of The Buyer
- Dan Greenberg
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Lets talk about neuromarketing and its implications for sellers. Sounds nerdy, and technical, or maybe a bit pseudo-sciency, I know. But, the field of neuromarketing has done extensive work on the mindset of buyers and how they perceive and make decisions regarding ad messaging, packaging, and customer experience. Consumers at scale provide the advantage of producing a lot of data, so it is much easier to study mass consumer purchasing, and then apply it to sales and business buyers. Many of the lessons from consumer buying are transferable when thinking about buyers in a sales setting. And yes, they are even transferable in a B2B buying setting. Why? Because human brains are human brains, and because people buy from people.
Well upwards of 90% of the decisions a buyer makes are not within the realm of that person’s conscious decision making. This can mean entire purchase decisions when we are thinking about consumers, but for B2B buyers, it is things like how much they like a presentation, or how happy they were with dinner after the meeting. Because of this, thinking about the messaging, the packaging of that message, and the buyer experience are incredibly important when addressing that part of the buyer’s mind.
Buyers want to feel like they have a grasp on everything but just need a bit of help to complete the “puzzle”. If you introduce too much to them, and they subconsciously feel like the problem is too broad or they need to learn too much to grasp the breadth of it, they will shut down and instead gravitate towards a problem that is easier to solve. Extensive studies have been done on choice architecture and the amount of choice that supermarkets should give buyers when it comes to driving the highest likelihood of a purchase of certain products. The answer is essentially that buyers want agency, and want to feel like they have a real choice, but as soon as you introduce too many options, the decision becomes unwieldy and overwhelming and the likelihood of a purchase drops significantly.
If we bring this into a B2B sales setting it sounds more like this. If we introduce zero or very little choice into a sales process, our buyers will be unlikely to engage in a serious way, either because they will feel uninterested in the problem, since there is no puzzle to solve, or because they will feel constrained by the fact that they have no agency and no real choice in the matter. Basically, if they have no choice, they will head for the hills because they don’t want to be controlled, and if the problem is not interesting to them and they feel as if they already understand the puzzle, then there will be no interest or engagement because there is nothing to solve, so they will zone out and think about a problem that is intellectually stimulating to satisfy the part of their brain that is conditioned to be goal oriented. If, on the other hand, too many choices are introduced, or there is ambiguity or lack of definition in the choices, the client will feel overwhelmed. They will decide that the problem is too hard to solve and they will devote their mental energy to another problem that satisfies their brain’s desire to find a solvable problem and solve it.
People love puzzles. They want them to be hard, and they want to feel accomplished once they have solved them, but they want them to feel solvable. They want them to fit nicely within their current understanding of the world so that solving them does not cause them to have to alter their relationship with reality.
It is our job as sellers to find the balance. We can’t overcomplicate the matter, but we must say something that highlights a problem that needs to be solved. That problem must be able to be solved by something that the client does not already fully comprehend, but is within the realm of the boundaries of the understanding which they already possess. In other words, we must talk in terms that are comfortable for the client and create a paradigm that encompasses both the current state and the desired outcome, but at the same time, there must be movement and evolution in the client’s understanding. Think of your client as a cat. If the string is sitting still on the table, they won’t care at all, but as soon as the string starts to move, they will want to pounce on it. Human brains are interested in things that change and move, as well as things that need to be figured out. Both of those can be used to your advantage.
One of the most effective methods I have used to create a comfortable and solvable puzzle for my clients is a four-box matrix. I often build this matrix for myself in order to visualize how I want to lead the client through the conversation:
Top Left (The Status Quo): The client’s current solution or existing state.
Top Right (Incremental Change): The landscape of “like-for-like” solutions the client could easily switch to if they just wanted a minor adjustment.
Bottom Left (The Ideal Outcome): The perfect solution, unconstrained by what currently exists on the market.
Bottom Right (The “What-If” Box): This is the solve. By logically walking the client through the first three boxes, they naturally arrive here and begin to ask, “if you could do {blank} for us…”, or “What if your solution could get us to {blank}?”
Walking a client through the 4 part puzzle can be tricky because it is easy to want to jump in and give answers, but allowing the discovery, and the conversation to develop, and therefore allowing the client to solve the problem themselves will put you in the best position to win the deal. Neuromarketing focuses mostly on consumers who are making decisions in the absence of sellers. That can teach us something. As sellers, we need to create an environment where our buyers can make decisions, not tell them the answers or try to make the decisions for them. So, what is the recipe for doing that?
As you lead the client through the puzzle; be concise, be clear, be interesting, be uncluttered. This focus and attention to the most vivid but direct points will drive the conversation in the right direction.
As you start to observe your client putting pieces together and truly engaging; find excitement, find humor, find simplicity, find comfort. This emotional injection will help the client feel in control, and at the same time, like they have a project that needs to be completed.
As you think about how to drive your client to the right conclusions; use active verbs, use direct words, use verbal images, use stories. This type of speech will help reinforce that there is a clear path to a desired outcome and that you are confident in how to guide them there.
Throughout the process be conscious of the fact that you always have to; tap into emotion, tap into hardship, tap into human connections, tap into yearning. These connections to human emotion and human relationships will keep you and your buyer aligned and connected.
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