The SONCAS method: six buying motives to adjust your pitch
Sécurité, Orgueil, Nouveauté, Confort, Argent, Sympathie. Six buying motives, six ways of presenting the same offer, and the phrases that give each one away on the phone.
Two prospects buy the same software for opposite reasons. One wants to stop worrying; the other wants to be the first in their sector to use it. Give them the same argument and you win one of them over while the other stays politely unmoved.
SONCAS sorts those reasons into six families. Its value is not theoretical: on the phone, each motive announces itself through a recognisable vocabulary, often inside the first minute.
A French acronym, kept as it is
SONCAS stands for Sécurité, Orgueil, Nouveauté, Confort, Argent, Sympathie: security, pride, novelty, comfort, money and rapport. The initials only line up in French, so the acronym is left alone here and each section gives the English term alongside it. The framework is usually credited to Jean-Denis Larradet in the early 1990s, though that attribution is a convention of French sales training rather than a documented source. There is no exact English-language equivalent; the nearest thing is the buying-motive checklists taught alongside consultative selling.
The six motives at a glance
| Motive | What the prospect is after | Words that give it away |
|---|---|---|
| Sécurité, security | Not getting it wrong, being able to reverse the decision | “risk”, “guarantee”, “what if it doesn’t work” |
| Orgueil, pride | Being recognised, deciding alone, not following the pack | “we’re not like”, “I’m the one who” |
| Nouveauté, novelty | Trying it before the others, not falling behind | “latest version”, “who’s actually doing this today” |
| Confort, comfort | Something simple, with no project to run | “complicated”, “we haven’t got the time”, “who installs it” |
| Argent, money | A number they can put a figure on, a cost under control | “how much”, “return on investment”, “budget” |
| Sympathie, rapport | Working with people they get on with | “we’ll look at it together”, “would you be my contact?” |
S for Sécurité, security
This is the dominant motive in support functions, in technical leadership and in anyone whose mistakes are paid for in public. They are not buying a gain, they are buying the absence of risk.
So the argument that works promises nothing spectacular: it shows the safeguards. Reversibility, comparable references, where the data sits, no lock-in contract. Promising the earth to a security profile worries them rather than winning them over. If you have a reference in the same industry and roughly the same size, this is the moment to name it, because a security profile trusts a peer long before they trust a supplier.
Wrong argument
“It’s a unique technology, nobody else on the market does this.”
Security argument
“Your data is hosted in France, there’s no lock-in contract, and you start with a single licence. If it doesn’t take, there’s nothing to unpick.”
O for Orgueil, pride
Pride rarely shows up as boasting. On the phone it takes the form of an insistence on being different: “our set-up is unusual”, “what works elsewhere doesn’t work here”.
The mistake is to contradict that claim in order to slot in a standard argument. The right answer takes it seriously and casts the prospect as the one who decides, not the one who follows. In practice that means handing them the comparison rather than making it for them.
Wrong argument
“Every company in your sector is already using it.”
Pride argument
“You’re exactly the kind of team that gets the most out of it, because you already measure what most teams don’t.”
N for Nouveauté, novelty
A common profile among founders and among the sales leadership of young companies. They are not afraid of change, they are afraid of missing it. The risk with this one is not losing the call: it is winning a meeting booked out of curiosity that never goes anywhere.
Hence a precaution. Once you have fed the interest, bring them back to a concrete use and a date. Novelty opens the door, it does not sign anything. A useful test at the end of the call: ask which team would use it first and in which week. A genuine novelty profile answers straight away; a merely curious one goes vague.
C for Confort, comfort
The comfort prospect already has too many projects on. They are not buying a feature, they are buying the absence of a rollout. Any mention of configuration, integration or change management cools them down.
Wrong argument
“We’ll configure your assignment rules, your custom fields and your sequences together.”
Comfort argument
“Nothing to install, it all runs in the browser. Your team logs in, and the calls land in your CRM on their own.”
A for Argent, money
Watch out for the most common misreading here: a money profile is not a stingy profile. They want a calculation, not a discount. Granting a reduction without giving them a figure simply confirms that the original price was arbitrary.
The only argument that lands is a calculation they can redo themselves with their own numbers. If you don’t yet know how many calls their team makes, you cannot argue on this motive: ask the question first. And when you do give the figure, give the assumption behind it out loud, because a money profile checks the assumption before the result.
S for Sympathie, rapport
The most underrated motive, and the most decisive on short sales cycles. You don’t work it with an argument but through the way the call runs: listening without cutting in, playing back what you heard, doing what you said you would, calling back at the time you promised.
One caution though. Rapport gets you the meeting, rarely the signature. If the only reason the deal keeps moving is that everyone gets on, a rational motive is missing, and the whole thing will stall when the budget decision comes round.
Spotting the motive in a minute
Three open questions are usually enough to bring the dominant motive out. They have the advantage of being useful even when your reading turns out to be wrong.
- “Six months from now, what would make you say this was worth doing?”
- “What made you drop it the previous times?”
- “Who else is involved in this decision on your side?”
The second is the most revealing. A security profile will tell you about something that went wrong, a comfort profile about a project abandoned for lack of time, a money profile will quote you a price they were given.
Listen to the verb as much as the noun. “We tried” points to novelty or comfort; “we had a problem with” points to security; “we compared” points to money. One sentence is not proof, but two sentences pointing the same way are enough to commit.
The same argument, six times
Here is a single product fact, automatic voicemail detection, phrased for each motive in turn. The fact does not change; what changes is what you say about it.
The AI filters out voicemails with 95% accuracy, and you keep the recording of every connected call so you can check.
Your reps stop spending their day listening to answerphones. They do the job you hired them for.
Dialling four numbers at once while the AI filters out the voicemails: 150 to 200 calls an hour, against 20 to 25 by hand. Very few UK teams are doing this yet.
Your team only ever sees the calls where somebody picks up. The rest disappears without them doing anything.
Your reps dial by hand, around 25 calls an hour. With a dialler that filters out voicemails, that is 60 to 80 in the same hour. Divide their weekly volume by three: that is the time you get back.
I’ll show you this on your own numbers, twenty minutes, and you tell me honestly whether it speaks to you.
The block is copyable so you can keep it next to the phone. In practice you only ever use one of the six lines per call: saying two of them in a row is how a pitch starts sounding recited.
Where SONCAS stops working
Three limits are worth knowing before you turn this into a systematic way of reading people.
- The individual’s motive is not the company’s. Your contact can be a novelty profile inside an organisation that only ever buys on security. The buying committee will decide on the second one.
- The motive moves as the cycle goes on. Novelty opens the door, money closes it. A pitch frozen on the motive you spotted during the first call ages badly.
- SONCAS tells you nothing about decision-making power. You can read someone’s motivation perfectly and still be talking to someone with no budget.
Once the motive is identified, the argument itself is built with feature, advantage, proof, which supplies the evidence without which the promise stays hollow. And the overall structure of the call remains the one set out in the CROC method.
Frequently asked questions
What does SONCAS stand for?
Sécurité, Orgueil, Nouveauté, Confort, Argent, Sympathie: security, pride, novelty, comfort, money and rapport. Six buying motives, generally attributed to Jean-Denis Larradet and dated to the early 1990s, by convention rather than from an established source. The framework is still widely taught in French sales training.
Can you spot a SONCAS motive over the phone?
Yes, but on verbal cues alone: the words your prospect chooses, the questions they ask, the point they keep coming back to. Allow a minute or two of listening before you commit to one reading.
Can a prospect have more than one motive?
Almost always. What you usually see is one dominant motive and one secondary motive. The dominant one shapes the pitch; the secondary one gives you reinforcement at the closing stage.
What is the difference between SONCAS and SONCASE?
SONCASE adds an E for Écologie, environmental concern, which appeared as sustainability criteria worked their way into business purchasing. The mechanism is unchanged: identify the dominant motive, then phrase the argument in its terms.
Does SONCAS replace a call script?
No, it adjusts one. The structure of the call stays the same, CROC or whichever framework you use; SONCAS decides the words the argument is made in. The two layers sit on top of each other without competing.