The Psychology of B2B Buying
Announcer: Welcome to episode 570 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Ben Wise and Darren Chiu, co-founders of Captivate. Ready? Let’s get started.
Ben Wise: You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brainy. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast. You know, I love questions and I get a lot of them, which is awesome. As you might expect, some of them come up more often than others. And over the years, one of the questions I hear pretty regularly goes something like this. Melina, I get how these concepts apply when you’re selling to consumers, but I sell B2B when we’re talking about large budgets with buying committees. In that corporate environment, it isn’t like selling B2C. This is a more logical experience. So I don’t need to think about this behavioral stuff in the same way, right?
Well, of course I understand why people want that to be true. But when you actually look at how decisions unfold inside organizations, they rarely follow a clean, logical path. Instead, you have people with different priorities and incentives. There’s someone trying to look smart in the meeting, someone trying to not be blamed later thinking about their career. And sometimes there is a quiet influencer super user shaping the outcome who isn’t even on your org chart or radar. So when you start to see how those dynamics play out, it becomes pretty clear that understanding people is just as important in B2B as it is anywhere else. And because it includes more people creating additional complexity and this interwoven web of sorts, I’d argue it’s often even more important than it is with B2C.
So when I started talking with Ben about an episode we could do together, I knew this would be a great topic to explore. Ben and Darren both work at Google and have spent years operating in complex B2B environments, incorporating their love of behavioral economics and behavioral science into that B2B selling. And through their company, Captivate, they share practical tools for applying ideas from psychology and behavioral science to persuasion, communication, sales, and decision making. They’re frequent speakers at conferences and corporate training programs on these topics. And, while we are going to talk a little bit about their work at Captivate, our conversation today mostly centers around tips that you can use to apply behavioral science and psychology into your B2B selling.
As you listen to our conversation, here’s a question to keep in mind. When you’re working on a B2B sale, how confident are you that you understand who is really influencing the decision? And if there’s someone that you don’t know about yet, who might that be and how can you find them really quickly? Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books and ways to get in touch and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/570. Now let’s jump right in. Ben, Darren, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
Darren Chiu: Thank you.
Ben Wise: Great to be here. Excited to chat.
Darren Chiu: Thank you.
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Well, I’m super excited to be chatting with you both today as well. But for everyone who doesn’t yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourselves and the work that you do?
Ben Wise: Sure thing. So, my name is—for listeners who can’t see who’s talking—my name is Ben. The other voice, Darren, you want to say hi?
Darren Chiu: Hello. Hi.
Ben Wise: Not at all awkward. So we, together, are the founders of a company called Captivate. We’re kind of on a mission to take the research from psychology and behavioral science and make it useful for people in the business world. So we run a monthly newsletter. We do lots of social content. We do public speaking, whether it’s conferences, corporate events, corporate trainings, podcasts like this, all about psychology in persuasion and communication and change management and storytelling. Just to make it more accessible to people in a way that’s actually going to be useful in their day-to-day jobs.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, absolutely. And like kindred spirits, which of course is why I wanted to have you on the show. Darren, anything to add?
Darren Chiu: He nailed it.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, he knows what’s up.
Darren Chiu: Yeah, what he said.
Debunking the Myth of the Rational B2B Buyer
Melina Palmer: Well, today we are going to be digging in on B2B sales and behavioral economics. And I know I get this question from people all the time. If it’s someone who’s thinking about, “well, should I read your book?” or “is this class actually for me?” or whatever it is, they’ll say something along the lines of, “well, that stuff is for consumers… but B2B is different. We’re less emotional. It’s all more rational. It’s not the same. This stuff doesn’t apply.” I of course have thoughts on that. But what do you all think about that?
Ben Wise: I suspect we have similar thoughts on this.
Darren Chiu: Yes, the answer is no, don’t do it.
Ben Wise: No. I mean this is probably the most common—not sure if I’d call it an objection—that we hear. We do a presentation and someone raises their hand and says the exact same thing: “I can see why that works for consumers, but I sell B2B or I market B2B and they’re rational.” It’s as though there is this faceless entity that is the corporation that has a robot making decisions, which obviously isn’t the case. When you’re selling to a corporation, there’s a human there. Whether it’s a procurement person or whichever stakeholder you’re talking to, you’re across the table from another person.
And all people have some similarities in the way our brains are wired, in the way that we interact with information, and the way that we make decisions. And they are emotional. And so I love when people push back because the irony is they get so emotional about not being emotional. You’re proving my point without even realizing it. But this is, if anything, more important I would say in B2B because it’s going to be smaller conversations. A lot of B2B, especially in sales, is one-to-one or one-to-a-few. Whereas with consumers, you’re doing one-to-many. If you know your audience in a one-to-one or with two or three people on the other side of the table, and you think through some of these psychology principles, you’re going to have a way bigger toolkit to help get to the outcomes and be successful.
Melina Palmer: It’s an interesting way to present that. Go ahead, Darren, what were you going to say? I think you’re having similar thoughts.
Darren Chiu: Yeah, I was saying that it’s funny that Ben said B2B almost seems arguably more important. And I think we know this intuitively because if you watch all the Hollywood movies, all these big deals—very massive deals—are happening in a very confrontational or intense scene where you win the deal. That is very often a B2B situation. I think a lot of that situation actually gets heightened to Ben’s point when the stakes are higher or you have more of a one-on-one conversation that you need to have.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, and that’s my kind of argument on this: you actually need to know these things even more because you have not just one person you’re trying to convince, but like ten people. It’s this buying by committee. And if you don’t know about the random super user in whatever department who has a heavy status quo bias and says, “well I’m not going to use that new system and so you’ll have to fire me if you’re going to do it,” that can just derail everything. If you don’t think about them, you’re dead in the water as it were.
Ben Wise: Yeah, for sure. I mean that just comes down to the way that you listen and being able to understand the underlying true meaning of what they’re talking about or what they’re saying, and figuring out what they’re feeling or what those objections are. Oftentimes the objection is not in the room with you. Like you said, there’s that power user somewhere in some other department that has an amazing amount of sway. If you don’t know that because you haven’t been listening or uncovering that stuff, then you’re dead in the water.
Darren Chiu: One of the questions we like to tell people to ask at one point in the meeting is: “Is there someone else who’s not in this room who might have reservations about what we talked about today?” It’s just a great way to open our conversation.
Preparation and Identifying Key Influencers
Melina Palmer: That’s a great question. When you’re in the meeting, is there any other stuff that you advise for people or as you think about, like if you were training a new salesperson and wanting them to be thinking about some of the behavioral stuff and where it comes into play? Like stuff to prep before the meeting or in the meeting? What are some key points you would advise?
Ben Wise: I think to start, I would say getting a sense of who’s going to be in the room in the first place and the level of influence and power that they have. Are they—you know, a lot of times the first couple of meetings you have are not with the decision maker. You’ve got to get through some layers to get to that person who can sign on the dotted line. You have a functional area that’s buying something from you and then you have a procurement team whose job is to grill you to get a better deal.
Everybody on that side has a different objective and cares about different things. What does this person care about? Am I talking to an end user? Am I talking to the person who’s going to use the data to report to the C-suite or to the board? I’m talking to procurement, who needs to show a win. Understanding their emotional state and their emotional drivers is going to be different from person to person and conversation to conversation. Why does this matter to them? Not at a functional level—it’s not like, “well, this goes 14% faster.” It’s what do they emotionally feel about this? Is it that they don’t like change? Is it the status quo bias? Or hey, maybe this is a great opportunity for me to look like a hero and get a promotion? Understanding that emotional motivation is your starting and ending point for everything.
Melina Palmer: Definitely. I absolutely agree with all of that. And having that list—even just knowing that procurement typically wants and needs a win. It is fascinating how we think about anchoring. It may seem like haggling, but they need you to come in and say it’s going to be $100,000 so they can get a win and get it for $90,000, even if it was always going to be $90,000. If you would have said $90,000, they would have needed it to be $80,000. So just say it’s $100,000 at the beginning. You know that there’s a negotiation; some have a percentage they’re needing to aim for. If you know those things, it can help so you aren’t caught off guard and lose the sale over it. It’s a very obvious “cobra effect” problem, which I think is so funny.
Ben Wise: But surprisingly common at the same time.
Cultivating Internal Champions
Melina Palmer: One thing I found over the years is having an internal champion that you know can help continue that sales process on the inside when I’m not there is helpful. Is that something that you would advocate for, and do you have any tips to find one and support them in that process?
Darren Chiu: It’s definitely important to have one for sure. And I think that goes to what Ben was saying earlier about knowing your customer. Because sometimes you go into a room and you think you’re talking to someone from the C-level, but you just don’t know who else is in that room who has the ear of that decision maker. If you’re not treating everyone with respect and really trying to listen and understand what their needs are, you could easily ignore or neglect someone who has the ear of the CEO.
In terms of how to find that person, it’s really different from client to client. One thing I will say, though, is whenever I find that person, it is very often when the company is going through some sort of change. Whenever a company or team is going through change, opportunities or challenges will present themselves. Usually, there will be one or two people who will step up to the challenge. I like to observe when that happens and be like, “oh, this is my champion.” This person is all of a sudden more “leaned in” because of this change that we are trying to push forward.
Melina Palmer: Ben, what about you?
Ben Wise: I think the psychology behind finding that champion is really interesting. Part of it is going to be the idea of credibility. If it’s my job to sell you something, you will automatically take everything I say with a bit of a grain of salt. That’s a natural human reaction. Having an internal champion who says the same things that the seller might say—but as an internal person—is going to come across way more credible.
Another key element there is the “endowment effect.” If you are part of creating something, you are more bought into it being successful. So if you have an internal champion and they have put in some of that effort and made some commitment towards that outcome, they are going to be so much more bought in. Cultivating those internal champions not only gets you credibility, but it makes you that much more successful because they are going to want your product or service that much more if they are championing it too.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, absolutely. And so there’s that balance of having a “this is the thing we pitch” and having a bit of room or space where that person is able to be a part of it—like “do you think we should go A or B?” If they can be part of shaping the ultimate proposal, they’re going to be more on board with advocating for it as time goes on.
Ben Wise: Yeah. And you think about most things that are getting sold B2B. It’s not like, “oh here is my widget, there’s one version of the widget.” It’s “we have this package of stuff and let’s figure out what within this giant menu makes the most sense for you.” Letting them help you build out what that suite of products is, is a way of getting them involved and committed. It’s that endowment effect.
Overcoming Choice Overload and Decision Fatigue
Melina Palmer: I’m so glad that you said that, because I definitely want to talk about the overwhelm, paradox of choice, friction, and data nightmare that comes in a lot of B2B sales. It feels like “I need to tell you everything, I’ve got all the charts and these are all the options, so pick what you want.” Thoughts about how terrible that is and how to fix it?
Ben Wise: I mean, I can’t remember the exact details of the study where they took a bunch of jams to a farmer’s market. When they had six options, they sold lots. When they had 20 options, people bought far less because they were just so overwhelmed by too much choice that they couldn’t make a decision. Our brains are inherently wired to try to be quick and efficient and kind of lazy. If the choice is too hard, then even if the outcome is good, I can’t make it.
It’s the same anywhere. When you’re selling B2B, if you put too much in front of them—especially at once—you’re not going to go far. It’s really about good discovery and really listening. What are their pain points? And then adjusting. So it’s not about your product; it’s like, “we are going to solve your problem.” Your problem is X, and Y will do that for you. We can get into the technical stuff later, but you don’t want to overwhelm them. You’re selling them a solution to what problem or opportunity they need to chase.
Darren Chiu: Have you guys heard of that shoemaker story? There was a shoemaker in a small town. He was very successful and before he retired, someone asked him his secret because a lot of shoe stores in this town didn’t make it. He said, “my secret is two, not three.” Every time a customer comes in, they ask for a first pair of shoes to try out. Then they ask for a second pair. When they ask for a third pair, he goes, “okay, great. Which pair of these three would you like me to take away before you try on the third pair?” No matter how many pairs he brings out, he always keeps it at two. The idea is to help them filter out noise and make it easier to make the decision. When our clients are bombarded with so many things, one of the things I always love to ask them is, “if you have to rank these four items from 1 to 4, how would you rank them?” They usually will rank them for me, and I’ll just try to remove the last one and last two just to help move the conversation forward.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. I love that. It also kind of gets people in the habit of making decisions. But there’s a balance—if you do that too much where it’s like “make a choice, make a choice, make a choice,” someone could have decision fatigue very quickly and be just like, “I can’t deal with this anymore.” Do you have any advice on a sweet spot for that, Darren?
Darren Chiu: One of the most common ones is three. This kind of goes back to anchoring. You’ll see this strategy in marketing where people will present three offers—one is ridiculously high, one is ridiculously reasonable, and one is ridiculously basic. Most people will go for the most reasonable one. I don’t see any studies for whether two is better than three, but I do know that by how common we see this three-tier strategy, it works very well for the general public.
Ben Wise: B2B sales are much bigger and much more complex. You’ve got to break it up into bite-sized chunks or manageable chunks with a bit of a plan. Otherwise, if you’ve got 18 decisions to make in the next half an hour before we can sign the contract, you’re going to lose the deal. We can set up three or four follow-ups and we can probably bang through two or three decisions at a time in each one and keep it bite-size.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, and the choice architecture is a big piece of that. Using phones as an example for B2C, you’d ask “do you want an iPhone or something else?” and then narrow it down from there. You can ask some thoughtful questions that they’re able to explain how they use the product so you can make a recommendation based on social proof. You don’t want to say, “thank you for telling me those things, here are the 47 things we could talk about, where do you want to start?” That’s a good way to not sell anything.
Ben Wise: And if you have a good relationship, they’re going to trust your judgment on filtering. “Based on what you’ve told me, I think these three options are going to be the best fit. Can we go through these in more detail?” If they trust you, they’ll be like, “sure, I don’t need to see the other ten because I believe that you have filtered those accurately for me.”
Darren Chiu: I think the most important part is actually how you frame those choices. For example, if you give them three choices in a B2B context, maybe you’re saying, “this is a crawl, walk, and run.” You are framing them as three different stages they care about. Or if it’s two, maybe you can say one is about “defending market share” and the other is about “attacking market share.” Completely different ideas, but both beneficial. Just frame it for them properly so they’re making choices based on how it relates to their specific problem.
Three Basic Human Truths
Melina Palmer: In your TEDx talk, you talk about three basic human truths. I think we should talk a little bit about what those things are and how that layers into B2B sales.
Ben Wise: Sure. When we went into the research, we found that all the different quirks of our biases tend to fall into three consistent patterns.
The first one: People are lazy and they hate change. Whether that is not wanting to get off the couch or the mental shortcuts people take in order to make decisions.
The second one is that perceptions can and do change constantly. The joke we like to share on this one is: when you’ve just had dinner and you go shopping for milk and eggs, you come back with milk and eggs. If you go shopping before dinner when you’re hungry, you’re going to spend $300 and come back with eight bags of chips because your perceptions are easily altered. There are lots of ways to do that in B2B—anchoring is a prime example.
The last one—and the most fundamental—is that people buy from people. I don’t care if you work for a company, you are still a person. That individual relationship is going to be foundational to any deal you’re ever going to win.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, absolutely. Think about the relationship piece. Trust building and relationships in B2B sales are often very long-term. It might be years of talking to someone before you actually close that deal. What’s the advice for building those connections in a good way over a long span of time?
Darren Chiu: One of the things we talked about in our change management keynote is about painting a future for your customer. In a long-term sale, one of the most important things is that you need to have a shared vision. The best way to convey a shared vision is to tell them where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, and what it’s going to look like once we get there. If any one of these three elements is missing, people will easily drop off. You’re not one team working towards one goal anymore. In the case of long-term sales, if you keep continuously reiterating that, it will be a really good way to build a connection and make sure you’re not swaying away from your goal.
Ben Wise: Often a B2B relationship doesn’t end when the contract is signed; it becomes an ongoing relationship. If you take a bunch of tactics to get them to close the deal and then kind of screw off or sell them “smoke and mirrors,” you’re never going to close another deal with them or get an upsell. So, I think understanding the value of the relationship is key. Yes, there are specific tactics—priming, mimicry—and those are effective, but at the end of the day, having a solid relationship with someone is a basic human thing. Listen to what they’re saying, understand their needs, and show some compassion and empathy. You just have to be that kind of a person. Sales, especially B2B, gets a bad rap—people picture a “used car salesman.” But it’s actually about providing two-way value.
Priming and Small Talk Tactics
Melina Palmer: You mentioned priming and mimicry. Are there ways you prime before going into a pitch meeting to help smooth the way? Let’s get some “brass tacks” examples.
Ben Wise: One I think about is the first one or two sentences you say to kick off a meeting. You’ve got to think about what is the mindset you want them to be in that will make them more receptive. When we do a training session about the psychology of persuasion, we’ll often start by saying, “If you’re the kind of person who finds human behavior and decision making interesting, I think you’re going to really find this a fun session.” That’s specific enough to what we do, and who is going to be like, “no, human behavior is boring”? It primes them to be more open.
Melina Palmer: How does that line up with all the banter and small talk before the meeting starts? Can that be bad—like if people start complaining about the weather or wishing they were still on vacation? Is that actually priming you to be in a negative space?
Darren Chiu: I have some thoughts about small talk. First of all, I think we should all get used to small talk. As a human species, we’re never going to get away from it. It’s our nature to “soft launch” into a relationship. It’s a good opportunity to be on common ground. It’s through those small talks you learn about someone going on parental leave or having a family dinner. You get to have tiny connections.
But what happens after the small talk is what becomes very critical. What kind of emotion are you trying to drive? Urgency? Collaboration? Fear of missing out? You can frame the same message differently. You can say a million-dollar upside is “so exciting,” or you can say, “holy crap, are you not going to execute on this?” It all stems from that initial context.
Ben Wise: If you can get one level deeper in small talk and understand a little bit about them, then you have stuff you can weave into your presentation. If you’re talking through a feature and you say, “I remember you said you were really struggling with whatever, this would be the perfect thing for that,” it makes them feel listened to. It’s very validating when someone paraphrases what you said back to them.
Melina Palmer: That also helps with the “unity principle” and being able to find those liking opportunities. If someone says they went to Texas A&M, maybe you bring up college football later. It gives you a reason to connect and a reason to follow up.
Dealing with Ghosting and the “Power of No”
Melina Palmer: Ghosting is real. In B2B, it’s often because people have back-to-back booked meetings and constant shifts in priorities. They’re not intentionally ghosting, but it feels like it. Do you have some rules about how many times you should follow up and how to avoid being ghosted?
Ben Wise: I think the first thing I would say is you want to avoid having a “follow-up” in the first place by having an effective meeting. You should set the next steps at the end of the meeting. “Can we set up our next call before we leave the room? How does next Tuesday at 4:00 work?” If you get that in then, you’re not going to have to chase them. But you can’t do that every single time.
Darren Chiu: This is where we talk about the “Power of No,” coined by Chris Voss, the famed FBI negotiator. It’s always easier for someone to say “no” to you than to say “yes.” So you should reframe your question where the desired outcome is “no.” Instead of saying, “Do you want to have coffee?” you would say, “Is it a bad time to have coffee?” Then they say, “No, it’s not a bad time.” It puts the power with them.
This works equally well in emails. Ben and I have so many screenshots where people ghosted us and we’ll just reply, “Have you given up on this project?” or “Have you decided not to move forward with this?” Any language like that really sends everyone into, “Oh, no, no, I’m not giving up, we’re still moving forward.” They very often reply. It’s pretty crazy actually.
Ben Wise: It’s so simple and so effective. I have screenshots of threads where it was two or three months with no answer. Then I changed it to, “Are you no longer interested in pursuing?” and eight minutes later they get back to me.
Melina Palmer: You’ve got loss aversion there. I’m guessing some people feel like they’re going to come off like a jerk doing that. Any thoughts on getting over that?
Ben Wise: A lot of things feel contrived to you because you know the background to it. The other side isn’t thinking that way; they’re just thinking you’re asking a question. They’re not thinking, “Oh, this is their fourth follow-up and they’ve swapped to a no-oriented question.” It can feel awkward, but it’s not.
Melina Palmer: Oh my gosh, though, you’ve got to not be too aggressive. I get pitches where they say, “Well, I guess this will be the last time I email you because obviously you’re busy… bye!” It’s ridiculous how over-the-top people are. We don’t want to be aggressive like that if they were never interested in the first place. But if they were, a quick “no” is a good thing sometimes because then we can just be done.
Ben Wise: A quick “no” is the only thing better than a “yes.” If you’re going to fail, you want to fail fast.
Closing Thoughts and Final Advice
Melina Palmer: As we close out, if people were only going to pick one behavioral principle to embrace for B2B sales, what would it be?
Ben Wise: I never say it’s a specific tactic. It’s changing your mindset to think of your customers as emotional decision makers, not rational decision makers. Everything will flow from that—it will change the way you present, the way you engage, and the way you ask questions.
Melina Palmer: Darren, what would you add?
Darren Chiu: My thing is: please don’t debate your way into a win. A debate is the exact opposite of a good negotiation. In a debate, I keep adding more and more logic until you have nothing to say, and the other side just feels that they lost and they don’t want to do business with you. A negotiation should feel like a collaboration. Always “lose the battle and win the war.”
Melina Palmer: Yeah, for sure. Making someone feel dumb is probably not a great way to sell something.
Ben Wise: It’s a very short-term victory.
Melina Palmer: For everyone who is interested in continuing to learn from you, what are the best routes to do that?
Ben Wise: Love to connect with anyone directly on LinkedIn. You can search for Ben Wise and Darren Chiu. We’re on socials @captivate2026, and our newsletter is captivatenewsletter.substack.com.
Melina Palmer: Thank you both again, Ben and Darren. It was great chatting about brainy goodness with you here today.
Darren Chiu: Thank you.
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Ben Wise and Darren Chiu for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing? For me, it’s how often B2B sales get framed as if the organization itself is the buyer. But organizations don’t make decisions; people do. When you’re working on a complex sale, you’re navigating a network of people who each have their own priorities and pressures.
That’s why the conversation around internal champions is so important. Credibility travels differently inside an organization than it does from the outside. When someone inside the company advocates for your solution, it lands in a completely different way. What story does your customer need to be able to tell internally for choosing you to feel like the right decision?
If you’re interested in learning more, please visit thebrainybusiness.com/contact. You can find the show as @thebrainybiz pretty much everywhere. There are links in the show notes at thebrainybusiness.com/570. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me—and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
