When Do People Buy?
A structured, practical exploration of why buyers hesitate and what you can do about it. Grounded in neuroscience and behavioural research. A framework you can apply to your own sales conversations immediately.
Buyers hesitate for reasons that are almost never what businesses assume. This session explores what is actually happening on the buyer’s side of the conversation, and why most sales processes create the very hesitation they were designed to avoid.
Delivered to your leadership or sales team, everyone leaves with a shared language and framework for what comes next.
The neuroscience of how buyers actually make decisions, and why logic and information alone rarely move people forward.
The PULSE+ framework: a practical, research-grounded approach to sales conversations that starts with the buyer’s experience rather than your internal process.
The session draws on a broad body of published research across neuroscience, behavioural psychology and decision science. Three studies are particularly relevant to what happens in a sales conversation.
Emotion drives decisions. Logic justifies them.
Research at the University of Southern California showed that damage to the brain’s emotional processing centres made decision-making impossible, even when logical faculties were completely intact. Buyers don’t make decisions through logic alone. The limbic brain needs to feel safe before it can properly assess options. Most sales processes speak almost exclusively to the wrong part of the brain.
Pressure produces resistance, not commitment.
Research at the University of Kansas documented that when people feel their freedom of choice is being restricted, they become motivated to reassert it. In a sales context, the harder you push, the more the buyer pulls back. Not because they have decided against you. Because the pressure has activated a threat response.
Autonomy produces better decisions and better clients.
Self-determination theory, developed at the University of Rochester, identifies autonomy as a fundamental human psychological need. Decisions made from genuine autonomy produce stronger commitment, higher satisfaction and longer lasting outcomes. The buyer who feels in control of the pace and direction of a conversation is not just more comfortable. They are more likely to commit and more likely to remain a client.
17 June 2026
When Do People Buy? — What's Really Happening When a Buyer Says They'll Think About It
Clockwise, Commercial Quay, 84 Commercial St, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6LX
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