A challenge in complex sales is to understand the customers’ decision making. The customers’ decision making, in turn, is determined by culture. Prosales and the Stockholm School of Economics have co-headed a research project, where the research question has been: How do customers make group decisions?

Our hypothesis has been that there is a limited typology of decision cultures. Our aim has been to identify these, and build a simple model of decision cultures that accounts for a large amount of customers. According to our research, decision cultures are distinguished by two dimensions: strategic maturity and problem management. If we combine the two dimensions of strategic maturity and problem management, we get five decision cultures: “subjective doers”, “objective doers”, “subjective planners”, “objective planners”, and “developers”. To identify your customer’s decision culture will help the qualification of business opportunities. It will also help the matching of the right sales approach with the right customer. This, in turn, will increase your sales performance.