OSS Buyers think they Buy with Logic… But none of us do

You’re in the business of OSS sales (we’re all in the business of OSS sales if we want to work on an OSS project). Your OSS sales assets are full of facts, features and benefits. That fits perfectly for every buyer who thinks and says their procurement decisions are logical and calculated.
Just one problem: psychology says buying decisions are anything but logical.
Want to know the real reasons buyers choose a vendor or product?

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At PAOSS, we don’t sell OSS. We aren’t expert at OSS sales. So please read on with skepticism.

What we do bring to the table though, is the experienced observations of a match-maker. We get to see, hear and feel both sides of a procurement event, the experiences and emotions of the buyer and the seller alike. We need to navigate all of that, to facilitate the dance that helps each find their perfect match… with as much logical justification as possible.

In this article we’ll look at OSS buying psychology and then give a bunch of ideas about how to structure sales collateral to make buying decisions easier.

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The Buyer–Seller Chasm: Why OSS Sales Feels so Broken

Across the OSS industry, the cost of sale seems to be rising endlessly. Not just in dollars and hours, but in frustration. Sales cycles stretch over months. RFPs are dense and robotic. Demos become theatre. Decision fatigue sets in (for both sides). And despite all the investment, too many vendors still walk away empty-handed, often never really understanding why they weren’t the winning bidder.

On the surface, everyone seems rational. Buyers ask for detailed responses, weightings and technical architecture. Vendors respond with facts, diagrams, capability maps and business cases.

Logic in. Logic out. Logic analysed. Logic reported.

But in the deep recesses of human psychology, there’s a another form of chasm, this time between how vendors sell and how buyers decide. One side speaks in logic. The other listens with a healthy dose of emotion entwined with their logical justifications.

If we want to shorten sales cycles, increase win rates and reduce the cost of sale, we need to rethink how persuasion really works in OSS sales.

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1. The Rational Buyer (and Procurement Event) is Mostly a Myth

The whole procurement process is dressed up as an exercise in objectivity. But research, and our lived experience, shows that decision-making is rarely that clean.

Some of the most compelling arguments behind this claim come from neuroscience and psychology:

• Researchers like Shiv et al. found that only 5–10% of our decisions are made rationally. The rest are shaped by emotion and intuition Neuroscience News.
  Can you believe that? 5-10%. Multi-million dollar OSS contracts are riding on 5-10% rationality!!

• Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis shows that emotions are an essential part of complex decision-making. People with damaged emotional-processing areas struggle to decide, even when they have intact logical faculties Wikipedia

• The affect heuristic is another shortcut: our feelings about a person, product, or idea powerfully influence how we perceive risks and benefits, even when logic says otherwise Wikipedia

• Emotional choice theory argues that emotions don’t oppose logic. They shape it. Fear makes us risk-averse; pride drives persistence. These types of emotional biases are baked into our decision architecture Wikipedia

In the context of OSS sales, this translates to a consistent pattern:

• Buyers don’t wait to understand every technical detail before making a choice. Realistically, there’s too much to consume. Decision-fatigue kicked in way earlier than that. Instead, they have a tendency to judge a book by its cover and look for emotional markers as a sense of safety, credibility, or alignment

• Facts and feature lists help justify choices later, but they rarely trigger the decision in the first place

• What matters more is how the vendor makes the buyer feel: understood, confident, calm, reassured

That’s why rational-first sales strategies often fail. They ignore the principal stage of persuasion, the emotional one.

Logic doesn’t disappear from the process. But it’s far less of a deciding factor than we might think.

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2. How Psychology Drives OSS Procurement

The idea that enterprise buyers are hyper-rational because it’s not “their money” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either. Psychology tells a different story, where people rely on shortcuts, gut feel and emotional cues when faced with complexity. (Have we ever talked about simplification here on the PAOSS blog? Maybe only seven or eight… hundred times it seems!!)

In addition to the dot-points above, System 1 vs System 2 thinking, from Daniel Kahneman, provides another example. Buyers like to think they’re engaging System 2 (slow, deliberate logic). But in reality, System 1 (fast, intuitive, emotional thinking) is doing most of the heavy lifting, especially when choices feel risky or uncertain.

But what really drives OSS decisions?

• Trust: Does this vendor feel safe and credible? Have they done this before for a company like mine?
• Fear: Will I be blamed if this goes wrong?
• Status: Will this choice look good internally?
• Familiarity: Does this solution or supplier feel known, understandable, manageable, reliable?

These emotions are rarely spoken aloud. But they shape everything.

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3. Emotional Bottlenecks: The Hidden Reasons OSS Deals Stall

We often blame long sales cycles on budget constraints or internal bureaucracy. But it’s often not that at all. Many deals stall because buyers don’t feel ready to commit emotionally. If you look closely, you’ll find that there are many forms of procrastination wrapped up in “diligent evaluation”

Examples include:

• Round after round of business case justification (The Burning Rings of Fire) (with ever-deeper analysis of numbers that are mostly made up anyway)
• Solution documentation running into hundreds / thousands of pages (with endless assumptions and what-if scenarios that would be much better tested in a POC / prototype than a document)
• Change approval reviews that force the documentation of edge cases that have a one in a trillion chance of occurring (but with limited before / during / after monitoring or adequate roll-forward / roll-back planning)
• Endless “paper” comparisons of vendor solutions against every other solution on the planet, usually with evaluation matrices that run into hundreds of weighted criteria that few decision makers actually understand or value (but without doing actual quantitative benchmarking tests)
• Never moving beyond “small-scale test environments,” because every new stakeholder wants to see their scenario tested before signing off
• The governance theatre of setting up committees, steering groups, and sub-working groups that meet endlessly, yet always defer the “go/no-go” decision to the next meeting

If you’ve worked in big-telco for long, I’m sure you can think of many, many more.

But the real reasons are more emotional:

• Buyers delay because they fear making the wrong call
• Stakeholders hesitate because they don’t trust what they don’t understand (the confused mind says no)
• Committees get stuck trying to align emotionally and factionally, not logically

Adding more facts rarely solves these problems. Instead, aim to reduce emotional friction.

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4. When Logic Backfires: Sales Opportunities to Win (or Lose) the Room

Logical overkill is one of the most common mistakes in OSS sales. And it backfires often in high-stakes moments:

• Demos that turn into feature marathons, overwhelming the room
• Decks that are 60 slides deep with no emotional narrative
• Proposals that answer the brief perfectly, but fail to consider the needs of stakeholders that are influential in the buying decision

These assets may be technically sound. But if they don’t build trust, spark clarity, or create emotional confidence, they fail to persuade.

When helping OSS Buyers to quickly find their best-fit solutions, we call upon the Inverted Pyramid approach (see diagram below). Using the rapid-filter approach, we can usually prepare a short-list of around 3-6 well matched solutions for deeper evaluation (including demos) within weeks.

However, on one recent vendor selection process, our client wanted to see an additional batch of vendor demos. Instead of the initial short-list of 6, they wanted to see demos from 15 vendors. Each vendor was given 3 hours to present. Almost every one of the vendors ran over time with their demos and decks, leaving no time to truly engage with the client emotionally. Two of the vendors totally lost the room (and the opportunity) even though they actually had strong technical capabilities.

5. What Behavioural Science Tells us About Selling Complex Systems

Naturally, OSS / telco is not the first industry to realise logic doesn’t sell.

Like the studies cited earlier, behavioural psychology has mapped out how people make decisions, especially when selling complex systems like OSS.

Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence, show up in OSS sales:

• Authority: Buyers trust vendors who speak clearly, confidently and demonstrate expertise (not just technical fluency). The opposite is also clearly true. I’ve seen strong solutions that were scuppered by lack of expertise, especially when a vendor is unable to demonstrate a buyer’s scenario that the solution can easily handle

• Social Proof: Case studies, customer logos and market adoption ease buyer fear (“others have done this successfully”). The early 2000s were a great example of what I called the first domino of sales, where a leading telco in a region conducted thorough analysis of numerous vendors and then other carriers assumed the winning solution must be right for them too

• Scarcity: This is one of Cialdini’s most well-known persuasion principles, but it’s also the most misused, especially in the world of software. Too often, it’s deployed as a manipulative tactic: “Act now or lose your chance!” But used ethically, scarcity can reduce friction by helping buyers prioritise.  A well-articulated timeline, backed by real delivery or capacity constraints, can help retain momentum on a transformation project or procurement event

• Consistency: Clear, repeatable messaging across pre-sales touchpoints builds trust

• Liking: It’s never truly a B2B (business to business) transaction. Humans buy from humans. Buyers are more likely to choose vendors who mirror their tone, values, or communication style

• Reciprocity: Providing upfront value (through helpful insights or advisory) builds goodwill and invites engagement. The fireplace analogy is a perfect example of creating value before receiving value in return

Neuroscience also shows that people make decisions emotionally first, then rationalise them later. Memory and attention are tied to emotion. If your pitch doesn’t feel meaningful or memorable, it won’t stick.

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6. Selling Emotionally Without Manipulating: Ethically Smart Persuasion

Let’s be clear: emotional selling is not about manipulation. Despite what I’ve observed from many OSS salespeople over the years, the goal isn’t to fake urgency, force lock-ins or manipulate the buyers’ pre-existing fears. OSS and BSS are already the Jaws of the telco world.

I totally get it. OSS procurement events can be painfully slow and salespeople are under pressure to close the deal and get the project underway.

But fear and trust are key contributors to the Buyer-Seller chasm. Emotional selling is better used to build a sense of clarity and confidence in the buyer’s mind, so they feel ready to move forward, not stuck or uncertain.

Ethical emotional persuasion looks like:

• Making your buyer feel understood, not pressured
• Reducing perceived risk, not exaggerating fear
• Building emotional alignment, not just logical agreement
• Removing as much friction as possible

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7. How to Emotionally Align Your OSS Sales Assets

Oof. This has been a bit of a longer read than I first intended.

But before we talk about assets, here are 10 fast lessons from psychology that impact every OSS sale:

1. Buyers use logic to justify (after the event), not to decide (before the event)
2. Trust is more persuasive than proof
3. Clarity beats completeness
4. Emotional friction and confusion creates buying inertia
5. Familiarity creates perceived safety
6. Fear of internal criticism is stronger than hope for success
7. Confidence is contagious (in both directions)
8. You rarely “win the room” with slides or demos. It’s the human cues that matter
9. Stories > Specs.
10. The person buying isn’t always the one choosing (it takes a village)

So how should you adjust your sales assets?

Decks:

• Lead with an emotional anchor that shows empathy for the buyer’s situation (eg “Here’s what your team is likely worried about…”)
• Tell stories about real challenges solved
• Use less text, more visual messaging

Demos:

• Focus on clarity and end-to-end journeys, not feature density
• Speak the language of the user (eg their device types, network topologies, service types, etc) to provide an anchor against what they’re familiar with
• Show outcomes, not just tools

Proposals:

• Frame your solution as the emotionally safest option
• Don’t bury the narrative in technical detail — guide the reader through the logic
• Use language that reassures, simplifies, and affirms
• Meet the emotional (and informational) needs of all stakeholders

Conversations:

• Listen deeply. Buyers often signal fears without saying them outright.
• Use mirroring and storytelling to build familiarity
• Signal confidence through tone, not just words
• Signal competence through stories and answers to the buyer’s questions, not by big-noting, as per the first date principle

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In the final stages of an OSS decision, the question isn’t “Which solution is best on paper?”

It’s “Which option feels the safest to commit to?”

That feeling comes from emotional confidence, clarity, trust and alignment. The sooner vendors recognise this, the sooner they can start reducing sales cycles, and winning more deals, faster.

If you want to craft persuasive, psychologically aligned content that has empathy for both sides of the Buyer-Seller Chasm, we’d love to hear from you. Whether demos to decks, RFPs to product positioning, white papers to executive briefing packs, if you’d like to fine-tune your materials leave us a note.