Say your accountant retires and you need a new one. You would like to think you would weigh up every option properly – comparing fees, checking qualifications and reading the reviews.
You would expect a decision like that to get the full, careful treatment. Often it does not. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist, showed that our fast, gut-feel thinking shapes far more of our choices than we would like to admit, even the ones we believe we have thought through.
If that is true of choosing an accountant, it is true of how your customers choose you. Follow that accountant search through, and each step shows you something about why some businesses get picked again and again while others get left in the dust.
Customers have a shortlist before they start searching
Before you have typed a word into Google, two or three names are probably already in your head. One a friend mentioned. One whose van you pass every week. One that keeps popping up on LinkedIn. They feel like safer bets than firms you have never heard of, even though you could not say why.
Back in 1968, psychologist Robert Zajonc found that simply seeing something repeatedly makes us like it more, even when we do not remember seeing it. It is known as the mere exposure effect.
For your business, turning up regularly and looking and sounding the same each time counts for more than one big campaign. If people keep coming across you, you are on the list before they have even started looking.
A confusing website feels like a risky one
Next, you check a few websites. One talks about “holistic financial partnerships”. Another lists eleven services and wants your turnover before you can get in touch. A third says plainly that it does accounts and tax returns for small local businesses, shows a monthly price and has a button to book a free call.
You do not sit there rejecting the first two. They just feel like harder work, and when something is hard to make sense of, we trust it less. Researchers at Princeton spotted this even on the stock market, where newly listed companies with easy-to-pronounce names tended to do better in their first days of trading than those with awkward ones.
If your home page needs a second read to work out what you do, plenty of visitors will not give it one.
Make the first step feel small
That third accountant has done something else well. You are not being asked to choose an accountant yet, just to book a call. A big decision has become a small one.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called this choice architecture in their book Nudge: the way options are set out changes what people pick. The UK saw it with pension auto-enrolment. Once saving became the default and opting out took effort, DWP figures show the share of eligible employees in a workplace pension went from 55% in 2012 to 84% by 2017. Nobody’s views on pensions changed overnight. The path just got easier.
So count how many decisions someone has to make before they can talk to you. Every extra one is another chance for them to put it off.
Put your reviews where the decision happens
Just before you click to book, you glance at what is under the button. A few reviews. An accreditation logo. A line saying there is no long contract. You do not read any of it closely. It is there to answer one quick question: is this safe?
That reassurance works hardest right next to the moment of decision, beside the price or the enquiry form. Tuck it away on a separate testimonials page and most people will never see it.
The psychology behind the approach
This approach simply makes it easier for people to say yes to something that is right for them. That is what the StoryBrand framework is built to do. Its creator, Donald Miller, has always explained it bluntly – if you confuse, you lose. Your customer is the hero, your business is the guide, and your job is to show you understand their problem, give them a simple plan and make the next step obvious.
The obvious choice is not always the best business
In that accountant search, you never properly compared anyone. You went with the name you knew, the website that made sense, the step that felt easy and the reviews that reassured you. Your customers are doing exactly the same with you.
Plenty of excellent businesses lose work every week to competitors who are simply easier to understand and easier to trust. Make yours the easiest business in your market to understand and trust, and you will not need to be the best on paper to keep getting picked.
Key takeaways
- Before a customer starts actively searching, they already hold an unconscious shortlist of two or three businesses – built through repeated, passive exposure such as a recommended name or a regularly seen van or social post.
- A confusing website increases perceived risk – if a homepage needs a second read to understand what a business offers, a meaningful share of visitors will leave rather than make the effort to work it out.
- Breaking a large decision into one small first step – such as booking a call rather than committing immediately – significantly increases the likelihood a prospective customer will act, as shown by UK pension auto-enrolment data.
- Reassurance such as reviews and accreditation logos works hardest when placed directly next to the point of decision, such as beside a price or enquiry form, rather than tucked away on a separate page few visitors reach.
- The business that wins the sale is rarely the objectively best option – it is usually the one that is easiest to recognise, understand and trust at each stage of the customer’s unconscious decision-making process.
