What Drives Customers to Buy—And What Holds Them Back
Apr 1, 2025
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Jeff Shore, a seasoned sales strategist and founder of Shore Consulting, unpacks the emotional mechanics that drive customer behavior. He highlights how understanding buyer psychology can reduce friction in sales processes. Listeners will learn about key motivators beyond money, the importance of addressing emotional dissatisfaction, and strategies to create urgency in purchasing decisions. Additionally, Shore discusses how effective salespeople leverage emotional intelligence to connect with customers, ensuring smoother transactions.
Emotional reactions often drive purchasing decisions, making it essential for salespeople to address customers' deeper emotional needs and dissatisfaction.
Successful salespeople share key traits such as achievement drive, positive energy, and coachability, which help them excel in uncertain market conditions.
Deep dives
The Importance of Emotion in Sales
Emotions play a significant role in the purchasing decision process, often overshadowing logical reasoning. Potential buyers typically make decisions based on their emotional reactions rather than purely analytical considerations. Understanding a customer's emotional dissatisfaction is crucial, as it helps salespeople frame their solutions in a way that addresses buyers' deeper needs and feelings. For instance, a family facing daily conflict over a single bathroom in their old home would feel a high emotional dissatisfaction, leading them to prioritize a new home that fosters family harmony.
Key Traits of Successful Salespeople
Successful salespeople exhibit three essential traits: high achievement drive, positive energy, and coachability. These characteristics enable them to excel, regardless of their previous sales experience. A strong desire to succeed drives top salespeople to continuously seek improvements and embrace challenges. Moreover, having positive energy impacts how customers perceive their sales experience, while coachability allows them to adapt and grow in response to feedback.
Creating Urgency in the Buying Process
Creating a sense of urgency in potential buyers is crucial, especially in a market characterized by uncertainty. Buyers often slow down their decision-making due to a heightened sense of risk, influenced by external factors like economic instability. To counteract this, salespeople should clarify the buyer’s current dissatisfaction and future promise, ensuring that these enhance the sense of urgency. By emphasizing the emotional weight of the buyer's dissatisfaction and presenting a compelling future outcome, salespeople can decrease perceived risks and accelerate purchasing decisions.
Reducing Friction in the Sales Process
Identifying and reducing friction points in the sales process can significantly facilitate customer decisions. Friction encompasses anything that complicates the buying experience, such as uncertainties about costs or logistical challenges. By addressing these concerns and making the purchasing journey as smooth as possible, salespeople can enhance the likelihood of conversion. Conducting focus groups or directly asking customers about their pain points can provide insights into the obstacles that hinder their purchasing decisions.
This week on The Modern Customer Podcast, I sat down with Jeff Shore, sales strategist, author, and founder of Shore Consulting.
We explored the emotional mechanics behind why customers buy—and what causes them to hesitate. Jeff shared a powerful framework that helps brands reduce friction, build trust, and create experiences that move customers forward with confidence.
If you lead CX, journey design, or customer strategy, this episode offers fresh insights you can apply right away.
Listen now—and discover how to turn hesitation into momentum.
This episode is sponsored by Scayle—the flexible, scalable eCommerce platform built to grow enterprise brands—pain-free.
Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer.