"I'd buy that" is one of the nicest things a prospect can say, and it costs them nothing to say it. That's the trouble with it. Until they commit to something, a yes is interest, not a sale.
What the research found
Psychologists reviewed 47 experiments in which people's intentions were changed, and then checked what those people went on to do. Behaviour moved, but much less than intentions did.
Money shows the same gap. Across 77 studies of consumer goods, the price people said they would pay was on average about 21% higher than what they offered when the purchase was for real. In a university experiment, people asked what they would pay named roughly the right price, yet at that price a third to a half more of them said yes than when they had to pay.
How big the gap is varies a lot from study to study, and none of the studies were of business buyers. The direction holds across several independent reviews.
What it means for you
Say five prospects tell you they'd buy, and you plan next month on five sales. Two sign. The other three weren't necessarily insincere: saying yes was free for them, and signing wasn't. If every friendly yes goes into your plan, the plan will keep coming out too high.
The researchers' own advice is to measure demand where something real is at stake. A signed order or a deposit is our small-business version of that, though the studies didn't test either.
When a prospect says yes
- Log the yes as interest, not as a deal, and plan only on what has been committed.
- Ask for a small commitment, such as a signed order or a deposit.
How Bamya CRM helps
Bamya CRM is a free AI-assisted CRM. It adds up your deals, stage by stage.
Research: Webb & Sheeran (2006), Psychological Bulletin; Schmidt & Bijmolt (2020), Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science; Hofstetter, Miller, Krohmer & Zhang (2021), International Journal of Research in Marketing. These are studies of individual people, the price studies mostly of consumers buying small items; none studied business buyers, so the 21% is not a figure for your prospects.