Impact Pricing Blog

I’ve been teaching the Will I / Which One framework for over a decade. It shows up in my books, my podcast, my training. Thousands of people have heard me explain it. And the core of it is right.

But part of it was wrong. Let me explain.

Where the Idea Came From

Early in my career I was pricing semiconductors. Most chips have competitors, and when they do, competitive pressure constrains your price. You can’t stray too far from what the market will bear.

But occasionally we made a part nobody else made. No competitor. No competitive price to anchor to. And something interesting happened: the normal pricing rules didn’t apply.

Here’s how semiconductor buying works. An engineer first decides whether to design a particular type of component onto their board at all. That’s a Will I decision. Only after saying yes do they look at which manufacturers make it. Usually there are several options, that’s the Which One decision. But sometimes there was only one source: us. Which One never happened. The buyer just decided whether to use our part or not.

That absence of comparison changed everything about how price worked. Buyers weren’t comparing us to anyone. They were just deciding whether to buy our part or not. We’d price on gut feel and adjust based on market feedback, staying within what seemed reasonable to buyers. But the competitive pressure that normally constrains price simply wasn’t there.

That insight stuck with me. When I later wrote Impact Pricing and needed a way to explain why price sensitivity varies so dramatically depending on the situation, those sole-source parts helped me see it. Buyers make two different decisions. First they ask “Will I buy something in this category?” Then they ask “Which one will I buy?” Price barely matters in the first decision. It matters enormously in the second.

The framework clicked. It explained a lot. I’ve been teaching it ever since.

Why It Made Sense

The logic was clean. Will I comes first. Which One comes second. You don’t shop until you’ve decided to buy. I did start softening the edges over time. I’d say buyers need to say “yes or at least maybe” to Will I before they shop. That was closer to the truth. But I still had it roughly as a sequence: Will I first, then Which One.

Here’s Where I Was Wrong

Buyers can shop without ever committing to buy.

Think about your cell phone. You notice it’s getting slow. The battery doesn’t last like it used to. You start browsing online — not because you’ve decided to buy a new one, just because you’re curious. You find the exact model you want. You know the color, the storage size, the price. You might even add it to your cart.

Then you close the tab and don’t buy it.

You went all the way through the Which One decision without ever truly saying yes to Will I. You never committed. The purchase never happened.

This isn’t unusual. It’s actually very common, especially in B2B. Harvard Business Review research found that 40-60% of B2B deals end in no decision — not lost to a competitor, just never purchased. Budgets get cut. Priorities shift. The project that was “in evaluation” quietly disappears. The seller marks it as lost to no decision and moves on, often without understanding what actually happened.

What happened is that the buyer went deep into Choose without ever reaching Commit.

The Framework I Should Have Taught

Working on my new book, Buyer Disconnect, forced me to think more carefully about this. Buying isn’t two decisions. It’s three phases.

Phase 1 is Notice. Something feels off. The status quo isn’t working the way it should. The buyer asks themselves whether this problem is even worth engaging with. This is the beginning of the Will I question, but only the beginning. At this stage, “maybe” is enough to get them moving.

Phase 2 is Choose. This is the Which One decision. The buyer explores options, compares alternatives, and starts to form a preference. This is where most of the visible activity happens, demos, proposals, evaluations. It looks like progress. But activity isn’t commitment.

Phase 3 is Commit. This is where the final Will I decision actually happens. Not “which do I prefer?” but “am I actually going to do this?” The buyer has to say yes to the cost, the disruption, and the consequences. In B2B, they also have to be able to defend the decision if it goes wrong. That’s a much higher bar than just having a preference.

So Will I doesn’t come first. Will I comes first and last, with Which One in the middle. Notice, Choose, Commit.

Why Commit Gets Underestimated

Salespeople tend to focus on the Choose phase because that’s where they’re most visible. That’s the work they can see and measure. By the time a buyer has a clear preference, it feels like the deal is almost done.

But Commit is where deals die quietly. The buyer liked your product. They were ready to recommend it. And then the budget got reallocated, the champion left the company, leadership asked whether this was really a priority right now, and the answer was no.

The deal didn’t fail because your product wasn’t good enough. It failed because the buyer never reached the point where they were ready to act, defend the decision, and follow through.

One More Thing

Almost all of my frameworks come from building something that mostly works, then finding the exceptions that force me to fix it. Will I / Which One explained a lot. The exceptions — buyers who shop without buying, deals that die after evaluation, projects funded and then defunded — pointed to something missing.

That missing piece is Commit. And it turns out it might be the most important phase of all.

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