Before we talk about confidence.
Before we talk about willingness to pay.
Before we talk about buyer disconnect.
We need to question something far more fundamental: What are buyers actually doing when they decide?
In this pilot episode of the Decision Series, Mark Stiving and Rebecca Kalogeris unpack a deceptively simple idea that reframes how every purchase works; especially in B2B.
They explore why value isn’t as concrete as we assume, why certainty is often an illusion, and why so many pricing conversations miss what’s really driving the decision.
If pricing sometimes feels disconnected from buyer behavior, this episode starts to reveal why.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Understand why value doesn’t exist at the moment of purchase; and what buyers are actually evaluating instead.
- Reframe perceived value as a belief about the future, not a fact in the present.
- Lay the foundation for everything that follows in the Buyer Decision series.
“Buying is a prediction of the future.”
– Mark Stiving
Topics Covered:
00:00 – Buying Is a Prediction of the Future. The foundational idea that reshapes how we think about value
01:40 – What Is Buyer Disconnect? The gap between how buyers perceive value and how sellers think buyers perceive value
04:30 – The Drill Example: When Does Value Actually Happen? Value doesn’t exist at purchase — it only exists if the future plays out as expected
06:20 – Perceived Value vs. Real Value. Why perceived value is all buyers have when they decide
09:45 – Why B2B Raises the Stakes. Business buyers are predicting both product outcomes and reputational consequences
11:40 – What Comes Next: Confidence. If buying is prediction, the next question is obvious — how do buyers build enough confidence to act?
Key Takeaways:
“Value doesn’t exist at the time of purchase.” – Mark Stiving
“Buyer disconnect is the gap between how buyers perceive value and how sellers think buyers perceive value.” – Mark Stiving
“In B2B, buyers aren’t just predicting product outcomes — they’re predicting what happens to their reputation.” – Mark Stiving
“There are two predictions in every purchase; I assume the product will behave the way I expect, and I assume I’ll behave the way I expect.” – Rebecca Kalogeris
Resources and People Mentioned:
- Yogi Berra
- Buyer Disconnect (Mark Stiving’s Upcoming Book)
Connect with Rebecca Kalogeris:
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript:
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Mark Stiving
Buying is a prediction of the future.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the uncertain relationship between them.
I’m Mark Stiving, Chief Educator at Impact Pricing, and we offer programs to help your company get paid more. And today, our guest is me. But I get to talk with the infamous Rebecca Calagiris. Rebecca, how are you today?
Rebecca Kalogeris
I’m doing outstanding, Mark. How about you?
Mark Stiving
I am doing very well. As you can tell, I’m still getting over this cold, but you know, hey, let’s go.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Right? Let’s go. And I’m super excited today because I’ve worked with you for 13 years, right?
Mark Stiving
Oh my gosh.
Rebecca Kalogeris
I know, which is not unlucky in this case. And one of the things that I love working with you is you don’t just know pricing. You are so passionate about it. You see prices and price stories everywhere and you’re always really thinking about the structure.
When we talk about this, I think about when you’re watching the detective shows and they have the murder board and it’s got all the pictures and the red string, you are constantly building the red strings between different pricing concepts and theories and really thinking it through.
And right now what you’ve been working on is just something that I think is so smart and so like it’s an aha and a oh yeah and so many things together and so I’m super super excited to dig in with you on the Buyer Disconnect.
Mark Stiving
I appreciate all the things you just said. I thought it was a great analogy, or at least a funny analogy. But I am excited about this topic. I have not been this excited about a topic in a very long time.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Yes, yes. So tell me, what is the buyer disconnect?
Mark Stiving
Okay, so can I tell you where it came from first? Would that be okay?
Rebecca Kalogeris
Absolutely.
Mark Stiving
So you may recall, probably a year ago, a year and a half ago, we decided that we were going to start using a concept called ‘context-driven pricing’.
Rebecca Kalogeris
I do, yes.
Mark Stiving
And context-driven pricing, quickly defined, charge what a buyer’s willing to pay.
Super easy. Has three tenants.
Tenant number one, willingness to pay as contextual. Tenant number two, willingness to pay as malleable. Tenant number three, perfection is impossible. Right? You can’t read a buyer’s mind.
And the more I thought about tenant number two, willingness to pay as malleable, we obviously want to put that on sales and hey, salespeople can do that. And that’s a great example of how salespeople can actually influence what buyers are willing to pay.
But it turns out there’s so many other decisions besides just that. And as I started to dive into market segmentation or product portfolio or pricing metrics or packaging, as we start to put all these pieces together, these all influence willingness to pay.
And I’m putting myself in the buyer’s shoes constantly asking, well, how am I going to make this decision given the decisions the companies have made?
And after, I got to say, here’s how I came up with all this. hundreds of hours of conversations with ChatGPT. I mean, it is fascinating what we’ve been through. I mean, it truly has been hundreds of hours of conversations.
But we’ve gotten to this point, I’ve gotten to this point that says the thing that was missing in pricing, the thing that’s been missing in a lot of the work that we’ve done is understanding how is it that buyers make purchases when value is uncertain.
Now that sounds weird, but I have to tell you, almost every purchase value is uncertain. Almost every single one. And so if I were gonna define buyer disconnect, I would say it’s the gap between how buyers perceive value and how sellers think buyers perceive value. Right.
And so that’s where the disconnect is.
As sellers, we think, oh, you got it. You understand my product. You’ve got it. And as buyers, we’re looking at that saying, I have no idea what that’s going to do for me.
Rebecca Kalogeris
So, you say that almost every purchase decision has unclear value. Is that like really everyone? Are there certain types that are more complex? Like I’m trying to, like I think about, well, I bought, you know, I bought a dinner. It was delicious. I knew it would be, or you know what I mean?
Like help me bring that home for me a little more.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So first off, I say every purchase. I’m going to tell you which ones don’t.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Okay.
Mark Stiving
If you are making an instantaneous purchase of a Snickers bar in the grocery store checkout line, there was probably no uncertain value there.
And on the other hand, another place where you see it is anytime we’ve bought something over and over and over again and we just have huge trust, we know what it’s going to do, right?
So there’s no uncertain value there. But your car just broke down and you got to go buy a new car. Now, do you know what the value of each of those alternatives are that you might consider?
Rebecca Kalogeris
No.
Mark Stiving
And that’s what I mean, because most of the time when we buy something, we’re buying it for the first time and we’re spending a lot of time deliberating and trying to figure out what’s the right fit for me, what’s going to work the best.
And in truth, in that whole decision process, we have really no idea. We’re doing the best we possibly can to figure it out as buyers.
Rebecca Kalogeris
And what’s so funny is now you have so much buyer remorse, right? It’s because you think one way and then you’re like, you think you’ve gone through the whole process and you make a smart choice and you’re like, well, these, no.
Mark Stiving
Absolutely. And so there’s lots of examples where we can get people to buy something that they didn’t really need or didn’t really want. But here’s what happens is we convince them at the moment of purchase that there is enough value.
So we’ve all talked in pricing, we always talk about perceived value versus real value, right? So perceived value is what buyers buy from. And now what is perceived value? That’s really fascinating because in truth, value doesn’t exist at the time of purchase. There is no value.
So, you know, I love talking about drills for some reason, I have no idea why, but you go to the hardware store. It’s your favorite bit. You go to the hardware store, you buy a drill, you’re standing outside of Home Depot holding the drill in your hand, you’ve paid for it, you’ve bought it, and it has delivered zero value to you. It doesn’t deliver value until you get home and take it out of the package and charge it up and then drill a hole. Now it’s delivering value.
You talked about your dinner, right? You’re sitting there at the restaurant, you’ve ordered your dinner, so you’ve now made the purchase, but you’ve gotten no value, you haven’t eaten it yet. Sure. And what’s even fascinating, we’ll go back to uncertainty, you don’t even know if it was good before you ordered it. Oh, I think I’ll try this today. And sometimes it’s not good, and sometimes it is great. But it’s uncertain.
That value is uncertain when we make the purchase decision. And that is fascinating to me. Because it drives so many things.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Right. You think about the cars we were talking about. If I buy a car, it doesn’t deliver value until I bought it so that I would have dependable ride to and from work and it won’t break down and it’ll be okay in the snow.
All of those things. I am buying without having the value delivered yet. I just believe that value at the moment.
Mark Stiving
Yep. That’s exactly right. And so let’s jump to the very first nugget. This is like, I’ve had so many ahas as I’ve worked on this process and thought through what’s really happening.
So here’s the very first nugget that I love.
Buying is a prediction of the future. Right?
So if we think about it, we don’t know what value is. We don’t know what real value is. We have perceived value. And so we buy something, car, restaurant, meal, drill, whatever it is, we buy something believing that it’s going to deliver value to us in the future.
And so that’s always the case. I can’t think of an example where we buy after we’ve experienced it, after we know what the value’s gonna be. And so in almost all cases, our buyers are making predictions.
You may have heard this one philosopher, he’s given credit for this saying, predictions are hard, especially about the future. This was the infamous Yogi Berra.
Actually, there’s a lot of debate on who actually said those words, but still, Yogi gets credit. But they are. Predictions are hard.
How often do we make correct predictions?
And so it’s no wonder that we have buyer’s remorse or regret in a lot of cases. I’m sure you’ve never done this, but it’s possible that I’ve joined a gym and never gone. I’ve heard rumor that kitchen drawers are filled with gadgets that never get used.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Oh God, yeah. For like that one recipe you’re going to make sometime and then you don’t. Yes, I have those.
Mark Stiving
And so in every one of those, we made a prediction and we were wrong. But we were wrong about the future.
At the moment we bought it, we were right. Because what we were buying was perceived value.
And so that’s what happens in almost every single purchase. And so we go to B2B, in B2B, almost every purchase is like this.
Rebecca Kalogeris
They’re more complex too, right?
Mark Stiving
Yep. They’re complex. We’re worried about, can we justify this to somebody? There’s so much going on in a B2B purchase, but there’s still all of this uncertainty.
And that’s what we have to start thinking about.
Now, what I find fascinating about this whole concept of buyer disconnect and uncertainty is I don’t know anybody else who talks about it.
Rebecca Kalogeris
No, I mean, it’s true that it’s a prediction, but I’ve never thought of it that way, right? Like, you know you’re, I’ve never realized, in all situations, you can only have so much information, and you’re just going to have to assume it’s the best choice, and assume that you will use it, or, you know, like, there’s the two parts of it, that my behavior will be what I expected, and its behavior will be what I expected.
And I can’t, you know, I’m thinking of all the different purchases, and it’s 100% true, but I don’t know that we recognize it. And so the impact that would have as a buyer that we do subconsciously is really interesting, especially in B2B where there’s more at potential risk, either price-wise or reputation-wise within the organization as you made the purchase decision. Yeah.
Mark Stiving
And what’s really fascinating is if you think about an individual inside a company, they have to reduce uncertainty, build up enough confidence to say, hey, this is the right solution for us as a company.
And at the same time, they know they’re risking their own reputation. And so they’re predicting what’s going to happen to their reputation. They’re predicting what’s going to happen to the company all at the same time.
Rebecca Kalogeris
That’s true. I don’t have to defend my decision when I buy shoes, right? You know what I mean? Or any of my sort of personal, maybe if I went and bought a car, my husband would be like, and?
But for the most part, right, you don’t have that same reputation on the line with those decisions. And so, again, that adds another desire for certainty. I would need a higher level of certainty to make those purchases.
Mark Stiving
Yep. So I’m going to disagree with that just a little bit. By the way, I think you’re right. But you still do justify, have to justify and defend when you buy a pair of shoes. But let’s save that because that happens to be the sixth law of our six laws of value.
And we’ll talk about that when we get to that sixth law. We’ve been at this for a little bit. Hopefully people are enjoying this, and I find this whole topic so fascinating. Let’s do this again in the very near future, and what we’re going to talk about next time is confidence.
Because if you think about it, if I have to make a prediction of the future, what I really need to do is build up my confidence in order to make that prediction. That sounds good.
And how are we going to wrap this, Rebecca? Go ahead. Come up with something brilliant.
Rebecca Kalogeris
Ah.
Mark Stiving
OK, here we go.
Finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or if your company wants to learn more about Buyer Disconnect, feel free to email me, mark at impactpricing.com.
Now, go make an impact.
[Outro]
