What humans buy
Sometimes I read a quote and it sits with me for a long time, and today I’d like to share this one from Colin Dowling on selling. Credit to James Clear’s 3–2–1 newsletter where I first read it. I’ll share the whole excerpt but there is one point that really stood out for me — which I’ve highlighted in bold below.
“1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I’ve been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about people and it’s about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It’s about people and it’s about solving problems.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. I say in every talk I give: “All things being equal, people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal, then go make a lot of friends.”
6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other, then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.”
People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
At first, I thought it was being over simplistic. Four things? How can it only be four things?
Then, I pondered on the second item of “money”. Buy money? That sounds reversed!
In the end, I admire it’s simplicity and the ease of how it is applied. With my lens of Product management/development, I thought about every feature every requested and if you kept asking “Why?” you will eventually reach one of these four things. (As a Business Intelligence platform product though, I couldn’t really tie things back to sex, though maybe if I stretched my imagination it could be a way to increase desirability?)
Looking at each element:
Time — This is by far the most common one in the realm of B2B software. People want to spend less time doing things that computers/robots are good at, which tend to be repetitive, boring, and menial. Instead, they want to have extra time to do meaningful work, being creative, spend it with loved ones, re-charge.
Money — To me, this is a link to competency. Competency leads to jobs, promotions, sales which then leads to money. When it comes to competency, there’s generally two categories. 1) Catch up (quickly) to baseline level of competency so that I get to stay in the game. 2) Stand out in the crowd with competency above my competition. This can be at a personal level or a business level. Capabilities that start out as differentiators slowly turn into commodities/industry standard. This is also linked to acquiring some sort of unfair advantage, which could be insights, networks, perception, awareness, etc.
Sex — This is not just the trading of money for sex. To me, this is the acquiring of power and attractiveness to increase one’s desirability as a mate. Perhaps more controversially, meeting your basic needs even when you have no power or low attractiveness…
Approval / Peace of mind — This category is pretty broad. As members of society, people want to have continued connections, and approval is related to how we want to be perceived. Peace of mind, on the other hand, is more related to how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Arguably, peace of mind is the hardest to acquire.
My general sense is that of the four, we value money the most, and are willing to pay a premium for it. Think about it, buying time is treated like cost-savings and therefore valued less, there is a lower bound to what you can save, but no upper bound to money you can earn. I think this is flawed though. Time is finite (in the sense of a lifespan) and equal (time moves at the same speed for all), and money is infinite and volatile. Money is perhaps elevated because it’s seen as what we need to spend to buy things. I think it’s actually spread more evenly though — how many times have you spent precious time and peace of mind in order to get money? Also, once you reach a certain level of wealth, it does not naturally mean you can acquire the other three. There are also things that time can buy you that money can’t, like relationships which take time to nurture.
Remember that the quote is about selling and not about basic human needs or motivators. It does not take away from missions, visions, causes and goals, but rather is what propels people towards said goals.
What do you think? What else do we buy that does not fit into these four categories? Perhaps Joy?
