Do Less, Not More, To Gain Buyer Interest
Most CEOs think growth comes from adding more—more features, more budget, more marketing. But all this really does is cause buyers to expend more brainpower to sift out what is relevant from all the other noise. Real traction comes when you cut back on what isn’t working to drive buyer engagement while doing more of what is moving the needle.
Why Your Amazing, Clearly Superior Solution Is Being Ignored
Here’s something I tell every client: no one browses B2B websites for fun—they visit with a purpose, usually to learn more about your company and product. The website’s main, most important job is to make it as easy as possible for prospective buyers to understand and evaluate your unique product offering. Sounds completely reasonable, right? It makes intuitive sense that a buyer doesn’t care about every product feature and functionality your solution offers. It also makes sense that users are more likely to engage with content that is easy to access and digest. This means clear messaging without too much clicking, scrolling, or form-filling.
It turns out, there’s real science behind why this no-frills approach works so well (thanks, Ben Scandlen. It’s called Rational Inattention. Developed by Nobel laureate Christopher Sims, the theory of Rational Inattention suggests that humans tend to make decisions based on limited information—even when more is available—because processing information is perceived as a cost.
The more information there is to consume and digest, the higher the processing cost. To minimize the implicit cost, buyers naturally gravitate toward information that offers the greatest utility for the least amount of effort. In short: If your brand or solution is complicated to understand or your website is tedious to navigate, buyers will not hesitate at all to take you out of their consideration set.
What Rational Inattention Means for Brands & Investors
You may have seen the buzz around Anthony Pierri’s LinkedIn post describing the redesign of his company’s homepage. In an effort to improve website engagement he and his team redesigned the homepage page to focus only on the most important things a potential buyer needs to know—what the company does, who it’s for, and how much it costs—right at the top. No scrolling, no digging, no long walls of text.
Of course, now we understand why it works so well. Pierri’s experiment matches Sims’ theory of Rational Inattention. By reducing the effort required to learn more about the company’s solution, Pierri effectively lowered the “cost” of processing the information—making it far more likely for interested buyers to engage with the site.
TL;DR on Rational Inattention
Big brands can afford to be inefficient. They win through reach and repetition. Smaller brands can’t. They need to be clear, fast, and easy to understand from the start.
That’s where decision science comes in. It shifts the question from “How do we get more attention and clicks?” to“How do we remove friction from the buyer’s experience and make understanding our solution as effortless as possible?”
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