Buyer Insight: How Buyers Actually Buy (And Why AIDA Isn't The Answer)

0:00How Buyers Actually Buy

0:11Hello, welcome to the Impact Pricing Buyer Insight Series, where we give you quick but powerful tips on how to understand, package, and communicate your value to maximize your profitability. Today, we're going to dive into a blog mark originally published on May 18th. Let's get started. For more than a century, marketers have lived by ADA, A-I-D-A, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It's a brilliant framework for sellers. The whole thing is built around a single question. How do we move buyers toward purchase? That made sense when information was scarce, the salespeople controlled access to it.

0:49Today, though, your buyers already have read the reviews, compared the alternatives, and checked your pricing before you know they exist. The problem isn't that buyers like information. The problem is that they don't know what to do with it. That's a different problem, and it needs a different model. Introducing Notice, Decide, Commit. Mark thinks about buying in three phases. First, notice. Attention is something you grab. Notice is something buyers experience. They recognize that the status quo may no longer be good enough because of friction, missed opportunity, competitive pressure, or just internal pain.

1:28Something shifts in how they see their situation. You can trigger that shift, but you can't manufacture it. The buyer has to feel it. And when they do, that's the notice stage. Second, decide. This is where the buyer does the work, right? They have to understand the problem, evaluate options, estimate outcomes, weigh risk. The output is a conclusion. This is the best path forward. But deciding does not guarantee action. And that's the third phase, commit. This is what actually moves the deal. Committing means allocating budget, accepting implementation risk, disrupting workflows, and taking political accountability for the outcome.

2:11In B2B, it often means asking other people to change how they work and owning that decision if it goes sideways. A buying committee can fully agree that your solution is the right one and still stall for months. They've decided they haven't committed. The gap between deciding and committing is where deals die. The bigger the organizational consequences, the wider that gap. Most companies respond to style deals by pushing harder, trying to be more persuasive. But that's the wrong move. Your job isn't to convince them. It's to reduce the uncertainty that's standing between their decision and their commitment.

2:53That changes how you market, sell, package, and price your offering. Can you think of any purchases that don't follow Notice, Decide, Commit? Because we couldn't. So if you do, please share them. We would love to hear it. And if you need help understanding, communicating, and capturing the value you deliver, reach out. This is what we love to do. Now, go make an impact.

3:24We'll see you next time.