Tang Ping Buying

The general rule is, anything banned by the Chinese Communist Party, was in fact likely something useful, uplifting and good.

They just banned the Tiktok spread hashtag for 'lying flat'.

#TangPing in English-rendered Mandarin.

Appearing to refer to doing the bare minimum at work to get by.

Thankfully, we don't all live under the China jackboot.

Yet what Beijing censors try to quell, is a trend beyond the firewalls of the Middle Kingdom.

We see it amid widespread work-life balance reassessment. Hastened by China, again you might say. From two years of lockdowns. Within labels like The Great Resignation, The Great Rethink and perhaps most closely, Quiet Quitting.

Whilst causes may be many, how it manifests itself might be less clear cut.

Imagine a buyer who has tangpang. How do you recognise that they tangpung? Can you mitigate their tangpinging on your stage?

Part of me feels like that if they're in such place personally, then they're not likely to stand in the way of any solution purchase.

Yet casual indifference could prove toxic.

If your boyfriend/girlfriend keeps putting off talking about your holiday plans, that's quite the sign, right?

One of the political mapping exercises I run features on one axis, the extent to which the buying personality loves us.

It's not a stretch to adapt that to show scale of love in general for the project.

You could even cross-reference that with level of pain they suffer or admit to/shout about.

There are also clever voting tricks we can deploy.

The Luxembourg Compromise one of my faves here.

Yet perhaps the most devilishly simple tactic might stem from the question to their buying unit aimed at gauging how much they care about what's on the table. In the more deliberate language of the Enterprise sell, this might sound like;

what priority this issue hold for you right now?

And as with any such intel, the results need vigorous checking.