The 5 Buying Decisions Customers Make (And How to Guide Them)
Every customer makes the same five decisions before they ever say yes to buying a product or service. Unfortunately, most salespeople only focus on one or two of these decisions which is exactly why deals stall, objections rise, and opportunities slip away. They also only focus on the ones that are comfortable, product and price. Far too often they also jump into these two decisions before the conversation has had a chance to start.
Let’s discuss the five buying decisions that we need to work through with the customer if we are going to make the sale consistently.
The Salesperson
Before the customer evaluates our product or service we have to offer, they evaluate us. The customer is trying to validate if we are someone they can trust, or if we are trying to just push them into something that won’t help them resulting in another round of trying to figure out how to move forward. If they don’t trust us, then the some questions they soon have are, what is the price? How can I get out of this relationship? Where is the escape hatch?The Organization
Especially now more than ever is that customers actually want to know what the organization is doing for society. Can they trust the leadership of the organization to support customers at an ethical manner? Far too often we see headlines with leadership teams, CEO’s, coaches, etc handling their organizations in a poor manner. Gen Z and Millenials really are trying to make an impact in the world and they want to partner with organizations that will either give back to support communities or provide resources for them to support communities.
The organization is an important decision on who customers will partner with.
The Product or Solution
“Is this the right solution to solve my problem?” That is a question that I often hear from customers and most sales people can’t answer it. The sales person will answer with well we have this feature and this benefit, how does that sound. The customer is then thinking how is this feature and benefit going to to solve this problem? They may not say it out loud, but this is what they are thinking. But….When the solution is positioned as the natural answer, the buyer feels momentum , not pressure. This means that the sales person needs to provide the solution, not features and benefits.The Price
The customer after making the decision to keep moving forward with the salesperson wants to know if the value matches the perceived investment? Is this solution to my problem matching the value that I have placed on my problem? Maybe it’s time, maybe is monetary, maybe its health, but maybe it is stress level? They are hoping the salesperson is going to help them with this decision.
Unfortunately, the sales person presents the price and then the wheels come off of the presentation…. The sales person begins get nervous and devalues the solution which essentially causes the customer to not see the true value. To present the value, the sales person needs to know and feel the value of their proposal and be confident.
This is a make or brake point of the process.
Time to Buy
So now we have made it to the final buying decision. If we have performed well in the process it is time for the customer to accept and sign the agreement to schedule the delivery of the solution.Sales people have provided what they believe to be the value and this is at some times where the customer says something along the lines of, “great I will keep this in mind for the future.” Leaving the sales person shocked at how this could have happened. It's unfortunately because this customer was not validated early on which is a huge miss. If done correctly the customer will sign be thankful and ready to move forward which is the ultimate goal to move forward with the customer to find other opportunities with this relationship.
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
How to Create a Customer-Centric Sales Experience
The biggest mistake sales teams make today is building their process around what they want to say instead of what the customer needs to understand. Features, benefits, demos, pitches, none of it matters if it isn’t anchored in the customer’s world. A customer-centric sales experience isn’t a tactic. It’s a strategic shift from selling to guiding, from presenting to understanding, from pressure to clarity.
Here’s how you create an experience customers actually want to be part of.
Start With Their Reality, Not Your Story
Most salespeople open with who they are, what they do, and why it matters. That’s backwards.
Customer-centric selling starts with different focus points.
Their pressures
Their goals
Their friction points
Their internal conversations
Their decision-making process
When a buyer feels understood, they’re instantly more open to being guided. Understanding creates influence. Pitchingcreates resistance.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe the Solution
Ask sharp, insight-based questions that help the buyer see their reality more clearly. Some examples of questions are below:
· “What’s the real cost of this problem?”
· “What’s slowing down your progress?”
· “What would success look like in measurable terms?”
A customer-centric sales experience makes the buyer feel smarter, not sold to.
Connect Solutions to Outcomes, Not Features
Buyers don’t buy tools, they buy transformation. Buyers care less about what your product does and more about what it improves. This means simply saying the solutions will help them be successful to here is how you see things change.
Shift your language from:
· “Here’s what this feature does…”
to
· “Here’s the problem this eliminates…”
· “Here’s the time this returns…”
· “Here’s the frustration this removes…”
· “Here’s the revenue this unlocks…”
Customer-centric selling ties every part of your solution to what the customer values most.
Build Confidence, Not Pressure
A customer-centric sales experience helps the buyer feel:
· Informed
· Supported
· Safe
· Capable of making a smart decision
· Enabled to move forward
Your role is to help them evaluate, compare, and decide without fear that you’re pushing them toward a bad choice. When buyers trust the process, they trust the decision.
Guide Them Through the Decisions They’re Already Making
Every buyer, consciously or not, is evaluating:
1. The salesperson — Do I trust you?
2. The organization — Can your company support me?
3. The product — Will this actually solve my problem?
4. The price — Is the value worth the cost?
5. The timing — Why should I act now?
A customer-centric process doesn’t fight these decisions, it supports them.
It anticipates concerns.
It removes friction.
It helps the customer feel confident at every stage.
This is how buyers move forward naturally, without being pushed.
Make the Next Step Frictionless
The moment a buyer feels confused or overwhelmed, momentum dies.
Your job as a sales professional is to make the next step:
· Clear
· Simple
· Low-risk
· Aligned with their goals
A customer-centric sales experience reduces decision fatigue and keeps progress effortless.
A customer-centric sales experience transforms selling from a battle to a partnership.
When you:
· Start in their world
· Diagnose deeply
· Align solutions to outcomes
· Build confidence
· Guide them through their real buying decisions
· And make next steps simple
…you don’t have to “sell.” Customers instead, pull themselves forward.
The future of sales belongs to the people who create experiences, not just pitches.
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
Influence vs. Persuasion: The Key to Sales Success
Most salespeople spend their careers trying to persuade customers.
But the best sales professionals, the ones who consistently win premium clients, shorten sales cycles, and create long-term relationships don’t rely on persuasion at all. They use something else called influence. And the difference between the two is the difference between chasing business and attracting it.
Persuasion Pushes. Influence Pulls.
Persuasion is about getting someone to agree with you. It’s pressure-based. It’s momentary. It works until the buyer steps away to rethinks everything.
Influence, on the other hand, is about shaping how people see the situation, the solution, and most of all you. Influence is earned, it’s durable, and it continues working even when you’re not in the room.
Persuasion Creates Resistance. Influence Creates Trust.
When buyers feel persuaded, they feel pushed and people instinctively want to push back. They hesitate, they stall, or they go silent trying to avoid the situation and the person.
Persuasion triggers doubt in the customer’s mind: “Is this salesperson trying to win, or trying to help?”
Influence on the other hand removes doubt. It builds trust because it’s grounded in credibility, clarity, and understanding the buyer’s world. Influence allows the customer to see how well the sales person works and sees how it aligns with what others have told the customer about this sales person. That’s right, customer’s talk to each other…
Persuasion Works Short-Term. Influence Works Long-Term.
Persuasion may get you a yes today, but influence gets you the following:
· repeat business
· referrals
· premium pricing
· faster yeses
· deeper relationships
· access to decision-makers
Influence positions you as someone worth listening to, not just someone worth buying from in hopes that this solution will work for the customer. When customers see you as a trusted guide, not a sales rep, they keep coming back. And here is a really big thing, they also bring others with them. That’s right they start selling for us when we use influence.
Persuasion may help you win a moment, but influence enables you win the relationship, the deal, and the future.
If you want sustainable success, more yeses, fewer objections, and customers who follow your lead then build influence. It’s the skill that makes every part of selling easier.
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.
The Tie Back Formula
Over the past few weeks we have been talking about this mystical formula and how well it works for sales and leadership to gain engagement. Today we learn the process for creating the tie back questions and start adding a tool to our toolbox for better sales and engagement.
Most salespeople know they should sell benefits, not features. But here’s the twist: the best way to highlight benefits isn’t by telling, it’s by asking.
That’s where tie-back questions come in.
A tie-back question connects your product’s features to the customer’s real-world needs. The stronger the question, the clearer the benefit becomes, and the more the customer convinces themselves of your value.
Grab a sheet of paper. Write your product’s features across the top. Under each, list the benefit. Then, under the benefit, list the need it answers.
Example: In my trainings, I use a clicker with a button that blanks out the slide.
· Feature: Slide blanking button
· Benefit: Audience attention shifts back to me
· Need: Refocus the group when making a key point
Once you know the need, craft questions that highlight it.
For the blank-slide feature, I might ask:
· “Would it be valuable if you could instantly refocus your audience during a presentation?”
· “How much more influence would you have if you could pause the slides to drive home a critical point?”
Notice what’s happening: I’m not pitching the button. I’m pulling the customer into imagining how much better their world looks with the benefit.
Below is the complete process of creating the questions that tie back your features and benefits:
Back when I sold stand-on lawnmowers (before they were a thing), I didn’t start with horsepower or specs. Instead, I asked questions like:
· “Have you ever had employees get stuck when a mower tipped near a retention pond?”
· “How do your crews handle steep inclines today safely?”
These questions tied directly to the mower’s feature, standing design with easy step-off, and the benefit: greater safety and maneuverability. Customers quickly connected the dots themselves and could see the advantage that the product was offering them. A safter way operate and have less lawsuits!
Tie-back questions do three things:
1. Expose real needs. You find out if the feature actually matters.
2. Highlight benefits naturally. The customer says “yes” to their own pain points.
3. Build alignment. By the time you present, you’re not pitching, you’re confirming.
Using this process with your products you will be able to make higher levels of engagement in your meetings with customers and gain traction / speed on their decision making. This is the essence of how we can make larger sales with the sales cycle decreasing.
The best part…When the customers start seeing the benefit you bring to them, they can’t help but tell all their collegues in the industry to contact you. Then your prospecting becomes more efficient allowing you to have more freedom and income in your pocket.
Does that sound like a value to you? If so, implement this and see how well it works for you. If you have questions reach out!
Master the Art of Influence: Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Lead Effectively
Are you ready to become the magnetic force that attracts top performers and your best customers?
I’m Kevin Sidebottom—keynote speaker, sales trainer, and author—and I help organizations unlock the power of influence to achieve breakthrough results.
In this blog, I reveal why influence is the ultimate currency in business and leadership—and how you can use it to:
✅ Motivate customers to stay loyal and buy again
✅ Build trust and engagement with your team
✅ Transform your leadership approach to inspire stronger performance
With decades of experience studying why people buy and how leaders earn loyalty, I equip sales professionals and executives to deliver lasting value, strengthen customer relationships, and drive higher revenue.
👉 Featured Resources to Grow Your Influence:
· Email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com
· The Sales Process Uncovered Membership
· The Sales Process Uncovered (Book on Amazon)
If you’re serious about elevating your sales process, leadership impact, and team performance, this blog will show you the path.