When talking about business sales leads, it is important to understand the buyer, and to create a customer through this understanding. Buyer behavior studies can play a pivotal part in this regard. A lot of time and effort have been spent on this relatively new discipline. And every buyer-study has unfolded some new dimension of this discipline. The subject has been approached and analyzed from different angles and under different premises. Different inferences have been formulated. But the subject, too complex to beat, still remains a theorem without a proof.

What motivates the buyer? What induces him to buy? Why does he buy a specific brand from a particular shop? Why does he shift his preferences from one shop to another or from one brand to another? How does he react to a new product introduced to the market, or a piece of information addressed to him? What are the stages he travels through before he makes the decision to buy?

These are some of the questions that are of perennial interest to business firms regarding the sale of their products. It is around these questions that the product and promotion strategies of the business firm ultimately revolve. In all of their strategies and plans, firms make assumptions as to how the buyers would behave and respond to marketing programs. Knowledge of the buyer and his buying motives and habits is thus a fundamental necessity for getting business sales leads.

It needs to be emphasized at the very outset that there is no unified, well-defined, tested and universally established theory of buyer behavior. What we have, today, are certain ideas on buyer behavior. Some of these ideas have taken their cue from economics, others from psychology and yet others have drawn cues from several of the social sciences simultaneously.