How your buyer decides whether to spend serious money with you

Most of it is decided before your buyer ever talks to you

Suppose your buyer finds your firm on a Tuesday afternoon, with a real problem, money to spend, and no idea who you are. Two other firms are open in the next two tabs.

From here to the day the money is wired, your buyer makes a series of small decisions about you, and most of them happen before anyone at your firm talks to them. The first one takes a twentieth of a second. When Stanford researchers had 2,684 people judge real websites for credibility, nearly half of what they said was about how the site looked. After that come the proof, the answers, the speed of the reply, and the person across the table, and any one of them can end it.

of the comments 2,684 people made while judging real websites for credibility were about how the site looked. On finance sites, 54.6 percent. Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 2002.

The document follows one buyer through those eight decisions, one to a page. Each page describes what your buyer sees, what your firm is probably doing about it, and two companies that do it differently: one that has been around for generations and one that hasn’t. Every example comes from the public record.

Your claims stand alone, with no proof beside them

At this point your buyer is reading. The site says the firm is experienced, trusted and results-driven. Every other site says the same, so those words carry no weight. When Edelman, the public-relations firm, and LinkedIn surveyed 3,484 executives about the material firms publish, the quality they valued most, at 55 percent, was that it references strong research and data. Only 15 percent rated what they read as very good or excellent.

The old guard. The Rolls-Royce headline is the classic example. David Ogilvy spent three weeks reading about the car before he found the statement quoted below and made it the headline. Under it he ran 607 words of factual copy, and in the ad itself the clock line is credited to the Technical Editor of The Motor. Ogilvy didn’t write the proof. He found it and put it next to the claim.

Warren Buffett goes further and publishes evidence against himself. His 2024 letter to shareholders says, “During the 2019-23 period, I have used the words ‘mistake’ or ‘error’ 16 times in my letters to you.” When someone counts his own mistakes in public, his other numbers become easier to believe.

The new. Wise, the international money-transfer company, uses the fee itself as the proof. Its 2024 annual report says it has “more than two-thirds of our customers coming via word-of-mouth in FY2024,” and its marketing spend in FY2025 was £53.8 million on £1,211.9 million of revenue, about 4.4 percent, calculated from the report. The price is published everywhere, and that is the evidence.

The fix. Put the evidence next to the claim. Most firms have far more proof than they show, and your buyer won’t ask for it.

The other seven, by name

After the eight: what it costs, how long it takes, the rules that don’t change, and the tools that do.