Lexicon ·
buying temperature
noun phrase, also 'buying temp'
- Stated meaning
- How warm she is toward him at a given moment, read so that he knows when to make his move.
- Operating meaning
- A customer's readiness to sign, read off a date, so that every sign of interest is logged as progress toward a close.
- Origin
- A sales term for a customer's readiness to buy, in use on the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast by October 2003 and explained there on November 6, 2005 with a car showroom as the example.
- Synonyms
- buying temp
September 8, The Van Buren, a concert. Between songs I asked 6 questions and she returned 0, and of 7 phone checks, 6 were hers. The day before, offered 2 options I had written, she chose the show I had already bought tickets for and said she loves it when a man takes the lead, as I recall it. The phrase was not used.
On November 6, 2005, a poster on the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) asked what the term meant, and the answer arrived 47 minutes later from a showroom. “Buying Temperature is a term used in sales as well,” the reply explained, and walked through a car sale: get the people in, have them look at the car, get them to like it, get them to imagine driving it. “But none of this is any good if you don’t get them to BUY the car.” The salesman’s last job is to raise the reading until the customer starts thinking, “I could actually buy this right now… if I financed it!”
The term was already in use. In October 2003 a poster on the same group read a drive home, during which she held his hand and asked twice for gum, as a high reading: “her buying temp was high.” The archive holds the phrase in 22 messages between October 2003 and September 2013. The market kept the rest of the sales floor, the opener and the close, and let the thermometer go.
Under load, buying temperature turns a date into a showroom with one salesman in it. Her warmth is read as a gauge with one use, which is to say when to close, and the reading is taken by the party on commission, so it runs warm. The original example came with financing, and the analogy keeps that part too: the reading peaks at the moment the customer stops asking what it costs. When both parties know the term, two salespeople take each other’s temperature and nobody on the floor has come in to buy. The man who explained it to the group named it as his own sticking point. “This is something I must work on.”
On September 8 I took readings all evening, and the instruments were mine. I asked 6 questions between songs and counted the 0 that came back, and I counted 6 phone checks against her and 1 against me. The room was a concert I had chosen, at a volume I knew, for a band I was going to see anyway. Somewhere in the second half I stopped measuring and danced on my own. It was the only reading of the evening that came out high, and it was mine.