What is the Calculus of Sales?

 

Critical Moments!

 

What is the Calculus of Sales (or more accurately, what is the Calculus of Buying)? It is understanding what happens moment by moment in a buyer’s process or journey. How does this understanding help?

 

Exploring and analyzing buyers’ sentiment on a moment-by-moment basis should enable us to determine exactly when they were convinced to buy. 

 

What was the triggering event? Was it a compelling story? Was it seeing a key dashboard or report? A review from a third party? A call to a colleague?

 

Prior to Newton and Leibniz, people focused on specific events but were unable to connect them. The Calculus enabled us to examine motion – what happens between events – what are the minute transitions? 

 

I wonder if these same ideas can be applied to sales and buying!

 

Can recordings and transcriptions be analyzed (by AI or whatever) to uncover the very moment a buyer makes the decision?

 

They say that people make rational decisions for emotional reasons. We accept this. But what are the specific emotional decisions, when exactly do they take place, and what are the triggers? What are the tells?

 

What are these Critical Moments?

 

Are there phrases, gestures, questions, statements, facial expressions or other entities that are indicators that a decision has been made? At that point do we need to move from “selling” to “supporting”?

 

Perhaps it is a sudden nearly imperceptible expression of excitement, or anticipation, or relief. I believe we can tease these out to understand and characterize Critical Moments!

 

In “The Credit Card Story” (a true story related in “Suspending Disbelief”), the prospect CEO gives a clear buying signal when he takes out his credit card and slides it across the table to the salesperson. But what happened just before that took place? That’s the Critical Moment when he made the decision to buy!

 

Thoughts?