Jamie P. Monat is a director and adjunct professor in the corporate and professional education department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. He may be reached at jmonat@wpi.edu.
Understanding how and why customers and prospects make purchase decisions is vital to maximizing profitable sales, developing new products, growing companies and developing predictive sales models. Although hundreds of articles have been written on this topic, there are many discrepant theories and there is no concise, validated list of the key determinants of customer purchase decisions. This article analyzes and distills 28 key papers from the technical literature to yield a concise list of eight key purchase decision determinants.