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Purchase of enterprise software packages has always been perceived to be a time-consuming and complicated activity by customers. However, the number of options to choose from and the amount of information available for each option have both increased dramatically over the last decade. It is well established that greater availability of both choice and information increases the time that customers take to arrive at a decision as they carefully weigh the pros and cons of different options. Such acute awareness of the advantages of the forsaken alternatives and the disadvantages of the chosen option also decreases customer satisfaction with the purchase decision and produces purchase regret.

Most suppliers of enterprise software packages are unaware of these difficulties faced by potential buyers. In their attempt to be customer-centric, they encourage their sales professionals to let the customer take the lead in defining his requirements and to only respond to explicit requests for support made by the customer instead of proactively prescribing solutions to him. They believe that they are empowering their customers by presenting all available options and providing a wealth of information such as statistics, use cases, white papers and testimonials for each alternative. However, one study has found that this responsive selling strategy decreases the purchase ease of buyers by 20 percent and increases purchase regret by 50 percent when compared to the respective scores for these metrics in the baseline scenario where the seller did nothing to influence the customer's purchase decision. On the other hand, proactively prescribing one specific solution from a suite of options along with a clear rationale based on a nuanced understanding of the customer's requirements was found to increase purchase ease by 90 percent and decrease purchase regret by 40 percent with respect to the baseline scenario.

(Adapted from an article published in Harvard Business Review: hbr.org)