Over half our deals never make it to a decision. And in most of those cases, we have no idea why.
That’s one of the reasons we studied buyer behavior for The Hidden Buyer Journey.
Here’s what we found. The moment you put a person into a role, inside a buying group, inside a company, inside an industry – things get complicated fast. But behind the complexity, there’s a pattern.
We have no tools to pick up internal signals when a deal is at risk. We don’t coach reps to read group dynamics. And we don’t really understand how corporate culture shapes the decision underneath the decision.
When someone takes a job, they pick up a work persona. That persona may or may not reflect who they are as a person. What doesn’t change is the behavior tied to their actual personality.
Know that personality type, and you can predict – with real probability – how someone will act in a given situation.
This is where the research got interesting. Birds of a feather really do flock together. Personality doesn’t just shape how someone works — it shapes the role, the company, and the industry they end up in
We call it the Two-Thirds Rule. In any given industry and role, two personality types make up at least two-thirds of the people in it
Over half the people who work in the airline industry worked in an operations role. The people in those roles skew heavily as Conscientious personalities (they are analytic and data driven). At Frontier, for example, it’s over 73%. Once you know it, you can plan for it
Now put the two ideas together. Personality predicts behavior. And that behavior is concentrated in specific roles, companies, and industries you’re already targeting
The Hidden Buyer Journey is the map for the things happening inside the deal that we’ve never been able to see or predict. Now we can
The graphic below shows why: a person alone is easy to read. Bury them in a role, a buying group, a company, an industry — and they disappear into the org chart
Win the deal by finding your way back to the person underneath. That’s where decisions actually get made.
