Buyer enablement · 4 min read

Stop selling features. And don’t forget to ask about the dog.

A robot mower, fifteen minutes in Currys and the one question nobody asked. What it teaches about helping buyers choose, and knowing when they shouldn’t.

I was fed up with mowing the lawn. Every weekend, the same job. So I decided to buy a robot mower and never think about it again.

Then I started looking.

One search at one retailer returned a wall of near-identical machines. Lidar, RTK, AWD. Cutting areas from 100 m² to 16,000 m². Prices from a few hundred pounds to several thousand. They all looked the same. They all claimed to be the best. None of them told me how to choose.

So I did nothing. I kept the old mower. It felt like the safe choice. You can’t make the wrong decision if you don’t make one.

I wasn’t unconvinced. I was overwhelmed.

Fifteen minutes in Currys.

Then the old mower broke, and doing nothing stopped being an option.

This time, a salesperson helped. She didn’t point me at the shelves. She asked about my lawn, and gave me three things to consider.

Then she recommended one: the MOVA LiDAX Ultra 800. A good brand, lidar, 800 m² of cutting area, and £799. Every reason mapped back to something I’d told her.

Ten minutes to understand the market. Five to choose.

She didn’t sell harder. She made it easy to buy.

The question nobody asked.

Then we realised something. We have a dog.

Even premium robot mowers can’t reliably spot dog mess. They cut it up, spread it across the lawn and get it stuck in the blades. The mower was right for the lawn. It was wrong for us.

Every question had been about the garden. The one that ruled robot mowers out entirely was about the people, and the dog, who live there.

Now make it software.

That was a lawn mower. I was risking £799 and a patchy lawn.

Your buyers are making decisions worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Several stakeholders are involved, and one person has to defend the choice for years. If they get it wrong, it can cost them their reputation, or their job.

If a lawn mower was enough to make me do nothing, imagine what a six-figure software decision does. The higher the stakes, the safer doing nothing feels.

Often your biggest competitor isn’t another vendor. It’s the decision not to buy.

What buyers need from a pitch.

Nobody wants to be sold to. Buyers want to make a good choice, one that makes them look good and won’t get them fired.

But most don’t know what their criteria should be. I didn’t know to ask about lidar or cutting ranges. The salesperson gave me the criteria, and that’s what made the choice easy.

Technology salespeople love features. Buyers need to know why those features matter to them. Lidar meant nothing to me until it meant no DIY.

The best pitches follow the pattern she used:

The customer is the hero of this story. Not the product, and not the salesperson. The salesperson is the guide who gives them a plan.

And ask about the dog.

The second lesson matters as much as the first. Easy to buy only works if it’s right to buy.

If anyone had asked about the dog, I would have saved my time, and the shop would have saved theirs. In B2B, that’s the job of qualification: finding the thing about a buyer that makes your product the wrong fit, before either side has spent weeks on the deal.

The takeaway

Qualify first. Then give buyers the big picture, teach them how to choose, and help them buy with confidence.

Want a pitch that makes it easy to buy? We help your team qualify first, then guide buyers to a confident choice.