Impact Pricing Blog

For more than a century, marketers have lived by AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

It’s a brilliant framework — for sellers. The whole thing is built around a single question: How do we move buyers toward purchase?

That made sense when information was scarce, and salespeople controlled access to it. Today, your buyers have already read the reviews, compared the alternatives, and checked your pricing before you know they exist.

The problem isn’t that buyers lack information. The problem is that they don’t know what to do with it.

That’s a different problem. And it needs a different model.

Notice → Decide → Commit

I think about buying in three phases.

Notice

Attention is something you grab. Notice is something buyers experience. 

They recognize that the status quo may no longer be good enough because of friction, missed opportunity, competitive pressure, or internal pain. Something shifts in how they see their situation.

You can trigger that shift. But you can’t manufacture it. The buyer has to feel it.

Decide 

This is where the buyer does the work. They have to understand the problem, evaluate options, estimate outcomes, and weigh risk. The output is a conclusion: This is the best path forward.

But deciding does not guarantee action.

Commit 

This is what actually moves the deal. Committing means allocating budget, accepting implementation risk, disrupting workflows, and taking political accountability for the outcome. In B2B, it often means asking other people to change how they work and owning that decision if it goes sideways.

A buying committee can fully agree that your solution is the right one and still stall for months. They’ve decided. They haven’t committed.

The gap between deciding and committing is where deals die. The bigger the organizational consequences, the wider that gap. 

Most companies respond to stalled deals by pushing harder, trying to be more persuasive. But that’s the wrong move. Your job isn’t to convince them. It’s to reduce the uncertainty that’s standing between their decision and their commitment. 

That changes how you market, sell, package, and price your offering.

Can you think of any purchases that don’t follow Notice, Decide, Commit?

Share your comments on the LinkedIn post.

Now, go make an impact!