AIDA.

The model

Four steps. Attention, meaning that someone notices you exist at all. Interest, that the person feels it concerns them. Desire, that the person wants what you’re offering rather than just thinking it looks good. Action, that the person actually does something.

The model is usually attributed to Elias St. Elmo Lewis and to the year 1898, and that’s the best-supported connection there is. It does deserve a caveat, though: what Lewis wrote in 1898 was a three-part formula, with the action step added later, and the acronym AIDA can’t be traced to him with any certainty. So the model is older and messier in its origins than it’s usually made out to be.

Building for the steps in advance

The most common use is troubleshooting after the fact, and that’s useful, but the model probably does most good when it’s used before anything has gone wrong. The question is then a simple one: do we have something to meet someone with at each step.

Something that catches the attention of a person who doesn’t know you. Something that makes it concern them, meaning that they recognise their own problem in what you’re describing. Something that makes them want it, which rarely comes down to a longer list and more often to it becoming clear what it costs to do nothing. And finally something small and concrete to actually do.

That doesn’t mean every buyer has to go through all four. Plenty of people skip steps, and some come in halfway, often on someone else’s recommendation. The point is that you consciously have something in place for the step this particular buyer is standing on, instead of discovering in the meeting that it’s missing.

This is where AIDA connects to Total quality, and that’s worth carrying with you when the material is being written. Everything you say in the first three steps builds expectation, meaning the denominator, and the delivery then has to live up to it. A promise that draws out desire but makes the numerator impossible has moved the problem rather than solved it.

The calm in letting a deal take time

It’s easy to read the model as though all four steps have to fit inside one meeting, and that reading mostly creates stress. Some deals close quickly, while others need acceptance to be built slowly and methodically, sometimes over several years.

There’s probably a value in knowing which sort of deal you’re in. A buyer who is still in the interest step isn’t a lost deal, it’s one that isn’t finished, and pushing towards action there usually just moves the person backwards.

Deals that have been allowed to mature that way also tend to be really strong once they do happen. The buyer has had time to understand what they’re buying, expectation has been set over time rather than in a single sales meeting, and the price rarely needs to be negotiated down to cover an uncertainty that no longer exists.

How it’s used for troubleshooting

Take the last ten deals you lost and place each one on the step where it stopped.

If they fell on attention, meaning the customer never got in touch, you have a visibility problem. If they fell on interest, you’ve been seen but you described yourselves instead of the customer’s problem. If they fell on desire, the customer understood and thought it was good but not pressing enough right now, which almost always comes down to the cost of doing nothing never being made clear. If they fell in the action step, meaning the customer was with you the whole way and it still never happened, there’s a next step missing that’s simple enough to dare to take.

The distribution tends to come as a surprise. Many assume the answer is the first step and spend money on visibility, while in practice the pile often sits furthest to the right.

Where it usually gets misused

As a funnel everyone is assumed to pass through in order and in one direction. Real buyers jump back and forth, drop out and come back two years later, and in a company selling to other companies it’s rarely the same person who goes through all four steps anyway.

It also gets misused when it’s used to justify more content at the top. More posts and more views only solve the first step, and if the drop-off is in the fourth, it makes no difference how many more people saw you.