Your Buyers Perception

For your business to gain success comes from understanding your buyer.

To do this you have to comprehend the perceptions of your buyer. Their perception impacts and influences their buying decisions and behaviour. A classic error that a business gets into is a price war with other similar businesses. But this leads to sabotaging your profit margins.

Instead understand your customers' perceptions and only then your bottom-line will show the results.

To realise the buyers’ perception you need to enter the “BLACK BOX” of a buyer.  This permits to see to see the world form the buyers’ perspective. 

A buyer’s perception can simply be explained as follows (thank you NLP):

It is vital to understand the perception of the buyer in three ways:

1. Knowing Your Buyer Perceptions – in terms of what how they perceive the world around them
2. Comparisons To Competitors – in terms of how they compare you to your competitors
3. Understand Brand Perceptions – in terms of how the view your actual brand itself

According, to http://smartmoneysuccess.com there are nine key dimensions to buyers perception these being:

Primary  Dimension	1.     Perceived Risk 2.     Relative Advantage
Secondary Dimension	3.     Observability 4.     Immediacy 5.     Complexity 6.     Compatibility 7.     Trialability 8.     Divisibility 9.     Availability

Furthermore, it is important to be aware of the buyer types as this allows see what is happening in their “black box” thus adapt your style during the sales process.  

According to Merrill and Reid there are four personality types or social styles thus in simple terms there are four types of buyer (image from http://m-d-s.com/blog/):

In other words perception will allow you understand the process by which your buyer identifies, organises, and interprets information to create meaning of your product/service.