I have been on the buying end of a lot of business to business sales lately. Throughout this process I have been thinking about why I choose one company over another. These insights into my own behavior as a consumer remind me of qualities and traits I need to be conscious of when I am the one trying to make a sale.

Let me give you a little background on the situation. Over the past few months I have been working with a company that is developing a monthly online subscription based consumer credit monitoring and identity theft prevention product.

The product alone is valuable in that consumers get monthly three bureau credit reports and scores, suspicious activity alerts etc… but not so great by itself to push us past our number one competitor  IDentityGuard.

In an effort to surpass our competitors and produce a best in class product, we decided to bundle a number of value added components with the product such as fully managed ID theft recovery, Internet Surveillance, $1 Million ID theft Insurance, Lo-Jack for Laptops, Anti-Keylogger Software, ID Vault personal password protector, Internet Security, and online backup.

Each of these components comes from different vendors and hence…the reason I have been in the position to speak with hundreds of people lately trying to make me a deal. I only give you background on the situation to give you insights into my thought process specific to this situation. For instance because this is a consumer product it is very important to us to go with brands consumers are more likely to know such as Norton Internet Security, Lo-Jack for laptops, Card Cops, etc…

With that, I’ll dive into the factors that have influenced my buying decisions.

1. Availability – If I am going to do millions of dollars in business with your company I want you to make it easy for me and to be available to me.
2. Attentiveness – I want to deal with reps who seem interested in the sale and attentive to my needs.
3. Did they do their homework? Do they understand my company’s business development needs and can they educate me on how their product best meets those needs.
4. Branding – unfortunately, for our product, branding played a huge part in the decision making process. We were definitely willing to pay more and jump through more hoops to strike deals with the better branded products. Another note about branding is that while our team disagreed on other facets of developing this product branding was not one of them. It was mutually agreed that we would always shoot for the number one vendor in the space.
5. Margin – It was important to me that companies anticipate negotiations and set high enough margins initially to account for negotiating.
6. Preparedness – has the company anticipated our needs beyond simply trying to sell us their product. I’ll give you an example. One company Elephant Drive had an incredibly well thought out presentation. Their proposal was thoroughly worked out to anticipate all of our needs in terms of integration, marketing, branding, multiple methods of connecting with their service, smartly tiered pricing to accommodate different options, etc…
7. Professionalism – by this I am referring to things like follow up and follow through, doing what they say, making it to meetings on time, if one individual couldn’t help us they would track down someone who could.
8. Persistance without being pesky. The reason why this influenced my decisions is because I was dealing with so many vendors that if one of the lesser known vendors disappeared off my radar for a while they were easy to forget about. Especially when matched against better branded competitors. Even if their offer was better.
9. Patience – sometimes these deals take more time than anticipated. If companies pressed too hard to speed up the process without regard to our developmental needs they would tend to fall out of favor with me.
10. Easily understood communications in the form of marketing material, data sheets, non-disclosure agreements, contracts, etc… overly complicated communication materials either too technical or containing too much legalese were a turn off.

With the exception of branding nearly all of the other factors boil down to basically one concept. Did the companies make it easy for me to buy? The more work they did on planning and preparation the easier it was for me to make a decision.

One last thing, it is important to read the fine print in everything. There are some people who will basically agree to anything just to make the sale. Later when the contracts have been drawn up they do not reflect what has been said.

Anyhow, what makes you buy? Make sure to leave a comment and share your knowledge and experience.

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