Our mentor, Roy Williams, described shoppers as operating in either one of two modes: transactional or relational, a few years ago. At that time some of us loafed around virtually, exchanging emails with friends, trying to complete a list of reasons that motivate people to buy things. (Thank you, Tom G. & Brett F.) More recently, we returned to compiling the list with the rest of my colleagues. Trying to understand these types of things is what drives us. It also benefits our clients.

What follows below is what we came up with, albeit likely incomplete. As you read this list, can you identify which of these motivations is relational and which are transactional? Can you see where they each fit within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [define]? Will you help us find additional motivations?

Some of these are self-explanatory. The forces that influence whether people buy include:

Basic Needs – We buy things to fulfill what Maslow describes as the bottom of his hierarchy; things like food and shelter.
Convenience – You need something now and will take the easiest or fastest path to get it. Think about the last time you were running out of gas, or were thirsty and found the nearest beverage of choice. This could also be choosing the safe vendor (no one ever gets fired for hiring IBM), purchasing something to increase comfort or efficiency.
Replacement – Sometimes you buy because you need to replace old things you have (e.g., clothes that don’t fit or are out-of-date). This could be moving from a VCR to a DVD player.
Scarcity – This could be around collectibles or a perceived need that something may run out or have limited availability in the future. Additionally, there’s a hope to gain a return on investment, such as collectible or antiques; anything that accrues value over time.
Prestige or Aspirational purchase – Something is purchased for an esteem-related reason or for personal enrichment.
Emotional Vacuum – Sometimes you just buy to try to replace things you cannot have and never will.
Lower prices – Something you identified earlier as a want is now a lower price than before. Maybe you were browsing for a particular large screen TV and you saw a great summer special.
Great Value – When the perceived value substantially exceeds the price of a product or service. This is something you don’t particularly need, you just feel it’s too good a deal to pass up. (Like the stuff they place near the end caps or checkout counters of stores.)
Name Recognition – When purchasing a category you’re unfamiliar with, branding plays a big role. Maybe you had to buy diapers for a family member and you reach for Pampers because of you’re familiarity with the brand, even though you don’t have children yourself.
Fad or Innovation – Everybody wants the latest and greatest. (iPhone mania.) This could also be when someone mimics their favorite celebrity.
Compulsory Purchase – Some external force, like school books, uniforms, or something your boss asked you to do, makes it mandatory. This often happens in emergencies, such as when you need a plumber.
Ego Stroking – Sometimes you make a purchase to impress/attract the opposite sex; to have something bigger/better than others, friends, etc. To look like an expert/aficionado; to meet a standard of social status, often exceeding what’s realistically affordable to make it at least seem like you operate at a higher level.
Niche Identity – Something that helps bond you to a cultural, religious or community affiliation. Maybe you’re a Harvard alumni and Yankee fan who keeps kosher. (You can also find anti-niche identity by rebellion, assuming you’re pretty comfortable with irony.)
Peer Pressure – Something is purchased because your friends want you to. You may need to think back to your teen years to think of an example.
The “Girl Scout Cookie Effect” – People feel better about themselves by feeling as though they’re giving to others, almost especially when they’re promised something in return. Purchasing things they don’t need–or wouldn’t normally purchase–because it will help another person or make the world a better place incrementally is essential certain buying decision.
Reciprocity or Guilt – This happens when somebody–usually an acquaintance, or someone rarely gift-worthy–buys you a gift or does something exceptionally nice and/or unnecessary. Now it’s your turn to return the favor at the next opportunity. Examples:

• Event – When the social decorum of an event (e.g., wedding, bar mitzvah, etc.) dictates buying something or another.
• Holiday – ‘Nuff said.

Empathy – Sometimes people buy from other people because they listened and cared about them even if they had the lesser value alternative.
Addiction – This is outside the range of the normal human operating system, but it certainly exists and accounts for more sales than any of us can fathom.
Can you think back to the last time you bought something and fully explain the reason why?
Fear – From pink Taser™ stun guns to over-sized SUV’s to backyard bomb shelters–and even stuff so basic as a tire pressure gauge–are bought out of fear. So, before you go knocking “fear” as a motivator, ask yourself: Are you Y2K compliant?
Indulgence – Who doesn’t deserve a bit of luxury now and then? So long as you can afford it, sometimes there’s no better justification for that hour-long massage, that pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream, or that $75 bottle of 18-year single malt scotch other than “you’re worth it” (best when said to self in front of mirror with a wink and/or head tilt).

These are the things we’ve helped clients think about. We hope this list at least gets you started. And let us know if you need help understanding your customers motivations. It’s what we do. But in the meantime…

What do you feel motivates people to buy? More importantly, what makes them buy your product of service?

When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms. What you’ll typically see is that the the forms ask for too much information and that can hinder conversions from visitor to lead.

Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.

The Consequences of “Low Quality” Leads

In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.

Five Steps to Solving the “Lead Qualification” Problem

1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.

2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.

3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process.

4. Improve your method of distributing leads. Often times the delay in getting form submissions responded to is your internal process of routing leads to the appropriate sales person. This should never be a manual process considering you lose a leads effectiveness with in the first few minutes. Think about it, the last time you submitted a form on a site, when did you want the response to your inquiry. Now! So do your prospects. Use a platform that will automatically distribute leads based on the profile of the customer you have collected through their visit(s). Distribution is often based on geographic region, company size, product/service they are interested in, etc. Either you can have the prospect fill this out in a form or most of this information can be collected and gleaned by web activity.

5. Improve your lead response time. When marketing aligns with sales using effective content planning, integrating the customer buying process with the company’s sales process, distributing leads that have not been turned off by your processes (and horrendous forms), providing sales people with details that matter to them about the prospect’s interests and motivations and then distribute those leads effectively, their isn’t a salesperson who wouldn’t want to respond to that kind of “qualified” prospect right away.

There is hardly anyone who would argue over the impact that search, social, and mobile technologies have had on the customer buying process over the last five years. However, while many companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition, they actually have a much bigger issue – keeping pace with their customers. Indulge me while I explore the changes we’ll see over the next five years.

A Marketer’s Job Is Already Hard Enough

Jeffrey, my partner and brother, and I were discussing this column and I took the following notes about marketing that I wanted to share:

• Many times when marketing is called upon to solve a problem, it’s not a marketing problem at all. Marketers’ challenges begin with the brand they choose to represent.
• Marketing and sales have always been driven to reduce friction buyers experience; always – and with every improvement in technology, logistics, or payment options.
• The day has passed since marketers were paid to make promises the business had only a vague intention of delivering.
• Transparency isn’t a choice, it’s what is demanded by your customers; authenticity is a choice and your responsibility as the brand.
• Getting heard through all the noise is hard enough, so anything short of a truly remarkable brand promise is simply more noise.

Technological and social advances over the next few years will force companies to embrace authenticity, improve customer experiences, or suffer the consequences. Will your company be ready to handle this future?

Tomorrow’s Customers

Tomorrow’s customer is already today’s connected customer, with information just a few clicks away on their computer or mobile device. However, when a 7 inch or so iPad-like device is in the pocketbooks of your grocery store shoppers, they’ll be able to point the device’s camera at the shelf in front of them and using an augmented reality program like Layer they’ll be presented with the information they need to make their best choice. Reviews? Check. Cost per serving? Check. Nutritional or taste comparisons? Check. Coupons or better offers available? Instantly downloaded or ordered elsewhere.

No amount of great packaging or promotions will be able to sell the customer if people say your product sucks or costs way more per serving simply because you say it uses premium ingredients and added nutrients when this information layer shows the “real” deal. With the wide adoption of shopping scan-and-compare apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser (already downloaded over 2 million times), is this new reality that far behind? Probably not, and it won’t be limited to the supermarket aisle either.

As All Media Digitizes, Product Discovery Evolves

As Apple and Google prepare to tackle the largest screens in the house with their TV offerings, what will those products look like in the next five years? Will those set-top devices they design constantly search out and deliver you the best content based on your personal preferences (sort of a Pandora for TV)? It could just be if Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s IFA keynote is any indication:

“Not only are you never lonely, you’re never bored! We’ll suggest what you should be watching, because we know what you care about.”

You can be assured the ads will become more personalized and targeted. Will those set-top devices sync up with your mobile devices to deliver content and ads on the go? Again, Schmidt may be leaving us clues from his speech:

“We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like.”

One day, you’ll be watching an episode of “Sex and the City,” fall in love with a blouse one of the stars is wearing, touch the screen and activate your shopping avatar to try on your clothes virtually and see how it will fit based on your personal dimensions, and be able to order it with just a couple of clicks. Perhaps it will be super chef Bobby Flay making an incredible barbecue rib recipe that you want to make at home; a couple of clicks on the TV and the recipe is synced up to your kitchen and the missing ingredients are added to your weekly shopping list. Of course, all this will be highly measurable and television show producers will work closer with advertisers to make sure the right products make it into the right content for their audience.

The Future Buyer’s Life Made Easier Day by Day

It is easy to see how the evolution and convergence of technology will continue to reduce the friction of the customer buying process, and I can show you countless numbers of other ways technology and advertising will change our lives in the near future. Advertising will start to fulfill its promises of true one-to-one messaging as we all carry powerful computers in our pockets and the systems are available to personalize our experiences to make our “future shopper” lives easier. It may only be a couple more years until our advertising makes us feel like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.”

In the meantime, Schmidt says, “I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” and I’ll spend my time thinking what companies need to do in order to optimize those selling experiences. Will you?

Watch this marketing keynote presentation- includes a few attendee testimonials (this is a 45 minute+ presentation, please give the video some time to load):

I dislike the term “Demand Generation”, also referred to as “Demand Creation” because it’s misleading.

Surely marketing professionals know better. I hope. You could always look it up on Wikipedia where it’s reasonably explained.

It’s only in several conversations with business owners and C-level executives over the last few months that I realized how misleading the term is.

Think about how the term sounds to non-marketing professionals. I mean really, you get this image of a marketer ripping and tearing peoples clothes off so that clothing would be in demand.  Or perhaps a mafioso showing up and asking you if you might need some fire insurance.

The demand for your product or service should already exist or you wouldn’t have a business, right?

As marketers, we want prospective customers to raise their hands, call, email or pick up the phone and talk to us. We want the opportunity to explain how their demand is met by us supplying our solution. So the objective is to frame our solution, product and/ or service as the answer to the prospective customer’s existing problems, needs or desires.  Therefore the objective is to re-frame the prospective customers questions so that you are answering them. In order to do this you must determine, in advance, what is their angle of approach.

What does that mean for your online marketing? You could have two different prospective customers reading the exact same content with each coming from a different angle of approach.  So that content you created can mean one thing to one person and another thing to the other person. You might convert one into a lead and not the other. The sad part is that both might be demanding exactly what you offer.

If you’re planning a persuasive experience, that’s more than a landing page for complex sales, please remember that people don’t read pages online.  Instead they experience online hyperlink to hyperlink. That’s why you need to plan the persuasive paths of your campaigns, website and lead nurturing material carefully in order to remain relevant and answer the questions they have the way they want them answered; that’s their angle of approach. An early stage buyer and late stage buyer would have different questions and therefore their angle of approach would differ. Plan your content that way, from the persona’s ( please read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?” for a more thorough discussion about personas) point of view, not your point of view and you’ll be successful at re-framing demand. Only once you’ve re-framed the prospective customer’s demand will they be willing to discuss your offering.

I hope that helps.