The Top 3 Reasons Why Buyers BUY

Over the past few weeks, I’ve posted a short series at OpenView Labs on the Sandler selling method based on a great conversation I had not long ago with GuruGanesha Khalsa. Ganesh is the CEO of the Sandler Training Institute of Virginia and considered one of the top authorities on the world of Sandler.

In other words − dude knows a thing or two about sales.

One excerpt from our conversation that I thought was kind of interesting came when Ganesh was telling me about the “3 Levels of Pain” that reps should look for during the qualification process. He said the big question that needs to get answered is, “Why are these people I’m sitting across from going to buy something from us?”

He went on to explain that, in his view, there are only three primary reasons why people decide to purchase something. So without further ado, here are the top three reasons buyers buy, according to Ganesh.

#1. They’re in trouble!

“When people are in pain, they get to a certain threshold where that trouble is big enough that they’re willing to spend money to get out of trouble. We call that pain. You’re in enough pain, and we’ve all been there. You’ve got only one car and one job … the car breaks down, you’re in pain – you’ve got to fix it.”

#2. The writing on the wall

“The second reason people buy is they see pain coming and they want to avoid it. Remember Y2K? Nobody was even concerned. Then all of a sudden it becomes an issue, it’s on the universe’s radar screen, and everybody’s scared #$%&-less that if they don’t spend a bunch of money to prepare for this, they can get run over by a train!

So that’s called fear of pain, that’s another big reason why people spend money. But it’s a little tougher to sell people on fear of pain than it is pain. When somebody’s bleeding profusely, they’ll spend money to stop the bleeding.  But if they’ve never bled before and you sell bandages, you’ll have to bring the future into the present and say, ‘Hey, let’s pretend you were bleeding profusely.’ They’ll just say I’ll call you when I start bleeding.”

#3. What’s in it for me?

“The third reason people buy is what I call gain. They see something out there and they start to believe, ‘Gee if I had that, I’d more successful, or more profitable, or more productive.’

Pain is here and now. Fear and gain are both futures.”

Each of these three reasons falls right in line with the Sandler qualification process. As Ganesh points out, it’s not just about identifying the trouble a customer is having, but also getting them to quantify the financial impact that trouble is causing for the business. If you can then ensure that customers themselves have a personal interest in solving the problem (i.e. gain), as Ganesh puts it, “the rest of the selling cycle is a hot knife through butter.”

Do you agree with the reasons above? What else motivates someone to make a business purchase? Sound off below.