About twenty years ago, I delivered a demonstration to a manufacturing plant in central Pennsylvania. This account was a prospective customer, and I knew I had started out on the right foot with the plant manager when I suggested we start the demo at 7:00 am. (To be fair, I had inside information that he was an early riser.) What I didn’t realize was how excited he was about our technology. After doing some application-specific work for him, he was over-the-top about our solution. When we were done, I asked for a purchase order as plainly as I would ask him to pass the salsa … and he agreed. By 10:15 that morning, I had a $90k PO.
No Return on Investment (ROI) analysis. No Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison. No logical justification. The plant manager liked it, got emotional about it, and bought it.
Would that happen today?
Probably not. There are exceptions, but today these types of decisions usually go through a process that includes a decision-making committee. On that committee is at least one analytical buyer that compares square footage price of toilet paper at the grocery store. No matter how emotionally charged your point of contact is, these analytical buyers want to be rational … they want logical justification.
So, the #1 reason salespeople must provide logical justification today is because someone on the decision-making committee will require it … no matter how good you are at creating emotional impact.
