
{"id":12765,"date":"2022-05-03T13:53:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T11:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/?p=12765"},"modified":"2025-04-25T14:07:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T12:07:04","slug":"dont-discount-emotion-personality-when-seeking-to-understand-b2b-decisionmakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/dont-discount-emotion-personality-when-seeking-to-understand-b2b-decisionmakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t discount emotion &amp; personality when seeking to understand B2B decisionmakers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>We are sometimes asked if and how our Agile Human Experience&nbsp;Intelligence\u2122&nbsp;(HXI)&nbsp;framework and approach applies to business-to-business usage and purchase decisions.&nbsp;The answer?&nbsp;Yes, it does,&nbsp;although the weight of some of the factors on decisions may differ a bit. To see this, let me briefly explain the framework.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>GutCheck\u2019s&nbsp;Agile HXI framework suggests that usage and purchase decisions are affected by the experiences that people have when they&nbsp;use and purchase products or&nbsp;services&nbsp;they expect will help them make progress and meet their needs. And those experiences are colored by everything that makes them human \u2013 from more general factors&nbsp;such as their personality traits and universal needs to demographic, household, and employment characteristics&nbsp;and&nbsp;media&nbsp;preferences. And from more specific factors such as the emotions that arise in more immediate or closer-in usage or decision-making contexts.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I like to think of all these things as&nbsp;similar to&nbsp;a strand of DNA. Your personality is part of the strand of DNA. Your universal needs are part of&nbsp;the DNA. As you\u2019re making decisions, those pieces of your DNA, regardless of what environment you are in, are going to play a role.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bringing it back to B2B, a&nbsp;person&nbsp;whose primary personality trait is&nbsp;openness, for example,&nbsp;may be willing to evaluate more vendors than people with other primary personality traits. Similarly, for universal needs (e.g.&nbsp;Maslow), a&nbsp;businessperson&nbsp;whose&nbsp;highest&nbsp;needs are for structure or stability may&nbsp;require&nbsp;more guarantees about the ability of the product or service to deliver,&nbsp;whereas someone whose highest needs are in the areas of harmony and ideals may care about aesthetics and design as much as delivery.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, in a business setting there are often many&nbsp;diverse&nbsp;stakeholders to attempt to please,&nbsp;and so the context (e.g.&nbsp;organizational design,&nbsp;maturity of the company, existing systems,&nbsp;etc.) in which the decision will be made plays a large role in the final decision. But even here,&nbsp;a number of&nbsp;holistic, human factors can influence the decision \u2013 especially&nbsp;any&nbsp;factors about which the decision maker feels strong emotions.&nbsp;But will business decisionmakers express emotions in response to a survey question?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I can tell you is empirically when we look at&nbsp;consumer&nbsp;responses to open-ended questions or commentary that&nbsp;are&nbsp;out&nbsp;\u201cin the wild\u201d&nbsp;(i.e.&nbsp;unsolicited commentary from online reviews, blogs,&nbsp;and forums), we tend to see about 25%-35% of those have some kind of emotion being expressed. When we look at B2B, we tend to see 15%-20%. It\u2019s there. It\u2019s at a slightly lower rate, but not that much lower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, we asked a group of technology decision makers to think about their last&nbsp;purchase and then tell us what they would say to a co-worker or industry colleague who&nbsp;they were advising on a similar decision. We&nbsp;found&nbsp;about 16% of all comments expressed an emotion (14% positive, 2% negative) while others expressed&nbsp;positive or negative opinions or judgments with no emotion (72% positive,&nbsp;11% negative).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An examination of these four groups of decision makers \u2013 those expressing positive emotions, position opinions, negative opinions, or negative emotions&nbsp;\u2013&nbsp;can tell companies selling them services&nbsp;more about&nbsp;the degree to which they feel&nbsp;the engagement has been valuable to them personally and to their company.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To discover\u00a0how\u00a0GutCheck\u2019s\u00a0Agile HXI\u00a0approach can help you understand your buyers at a deeper level\u00a0to\u00a0deliver\u00a0meaningful competitive advantage,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/contact\/\" data-type=\"page\" data-id=\"3178\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">contact us<\/a>\u00a0today. Your business growth could be just an emotion or need away.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are sometimes asked if and how our Agile Human Experience&nbsp;Intelligence\u2122&nbsp;(HXI)&nbsp;framework and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_toluna_hide_sidebar":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","entry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolunacorporate.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}