Five reasons customers won’t buy your new technology

Business customers find it hard to tell you why they buy one service over another. Forcing them to rationalise complex decisions involving risk, trust, emotion and other people is very hard. But understanding how they take decisions could make all the difference to your sales.

For most customers, managing downside risk is as important as the upside value they expect to get from a  new product or service. Here are five issues our research throws up that buyers worry about.

1. The risk of the new

This is not to do with how well your thing works, far from it; it’s about its expected utility value. And the customers’ unconscious mind tends to overvalue what they currently use and discount the value of something they don’t. Some early adopters don’t really consider this but they are in a small minority; everyone else does.

2. The risk of company failure

Young firms struggle not just from lack of brand awareness and reputation but also by virtue of being young. What customers know is that many do not succeed and will go out of business, which, for the mainstream majority, is a big problem. They worry about the risk of investing time and money into adopting a new way of working with a supplier that may well go out of business. So either they don’t buy or if they do, they want to know that if it does go out of business, they won’t be left high and dry. So whilst their behaviour and requests for information pre and post purchase may reflect this concern, they rarely mention why.

3. The value of proximity

Many technology business models rely on being able to ship a box or software access codes without having people on the ground. Resellers are often thought of as that resource but the truth is, many customers, without direct access to the manufacturer, see that as a problem. Access to the source . And the larger the investment or the more important it is, the more customers value access to local help. Local phone numbers and addresses on websites for example send a powerful message to these customers that help is at hand, in the same time zone. Its not that they necessarily expect to use it, it’s more the reassurance that it’s there. Experience shows that when comparing two similar technologies, proximity to local help and support can trump superior price or performance criteria.

4. Importance of human relationship

Anyone experienced at new technology implementations knows that usage and adoption is a far bigger challenge than anyone expects.. But technology providers’ business models rarely accommodate the levels of post sales support required for the client to extract the value. Which leads to client dissatisfaction and conflicts about the costs of providing the training and support they end up needing. Fear of failure is where human relationships become important, knowing that someone, somewhere will help bail them out of things go wrong.

5. Defendability

Whatever the relative merits of two competing technologies, often the decision comes down to ‘defendability’. The old adage”you never get fired for choosing IBM” is ,and always has been, the way many customers think.. At the end of the day, if the whole thing fails, customers will choose the supplier which is most defensible to their boss/board/shareholders so they don’t lose their job.

As any good salesmen knows, objections can be overcome if they ‘speak’ to the customer’s needs. But often these are hidden from them and even the customer. So its important to really get to know your prospective customer and understand their emotional concerns, not just their rational ones.

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