From taking to giving: how a buyer relationship grows

For the first six months of life a person can do exactly one thing: receive. Six months after that the same child is capable of a small revolt, biting the breast instead of waiting for it. By the age of two they can give something back, at first without any control over it, then with growing deliberation. The order is not accidental. It lays out the whole early dynamic of the psyche.

I keep returning to this sequence in work that has nothing to do with infants, because a company’s relationship with its buyer moves through the same positions. Most funnel problems I am asked to fix turn out to be a demand for a stage the relationship has not reached.

Early oral: the position where a buyer can only receive

From birth to roughly six months a child is in a state of complete helplessness and dependence. This is a depressive subordinate structure in the literal sense rather than a metaphorical one: the organism is capable of nothing beyond receiving what the environment hands over. There is almost no initiative in it. There is acceptance, or the absence of acceptance.

That is not a defect. It is an accurate description of the physiology of a newborn, and it is where the adult habit of passive waiting comes from. If basic dependence was not reliably supported here, an adult can get stuck waiting to be given something and never take the next step.

Your traffic arrives in exactly this position. A visitor landing from a search result has no relationship with you, no criteria for judging you, and no way of acting on you. They can take what the page offers or take nothing. Any attempt to extract a commitment at this moment, a demo booking, a callback request, a form with eleven fields, demands a competence the relationship does not yet possess.

Late oral: the first attempt to influence the source

Between six months and a year an iconic self appears, the first image of oneself, and with it the first attempts at top-down regulation of the primary object. The child bites the breast. This is not aggression in the proper sense of the word. It is an attempt to affect the source of supply rather than only to draw from it. The bottom-up wave, in which the environment fully controls the child, turns into top-down here for the first time: the child begins acting on the environment.

The bite looks trivial and is decisive. For the first time the child’s action changes the mother’s behaviour instead of merely reacting to it: the first experience of causality running from the inside outward.

In a commercial relationship the bite is unmistakable once you know what it looks like. A prospect who had been reading quietly writes to ask whether the price is negotiable. Someone tests your support with a question they could have answered from your own page. Somebody leaves a barbed comment under a post to see what happens. None of this is a buying signal in the usual reading, and none of it is a complaint. These are experiments in causality: will this company move if I push it.

Punishing the bite closes the channel. A company that answers the discount question with a policy paragraph has told the prospect that pushing produces nothing here, and the prospect goes back to passive reception, or leaves.

The anal phase: the direction turns from taking to giving

The next shift leads from the oral “I take” to the anal “I give”. The early anal stage is expression. The child breaks things, makes a mess, acts outward without regard for consequence, because physiological need at this point genuinely outranks social norms. A collision with the limits of the environment is inevitable and necessary here: it is what teaches that giving has boundaries.

This is the stage most companies find intolerable in a customer. The buyer finally gives, and what comes out is unshaped. A one-star review written in anger. A demand to redo work that was already signed off. A public comment describing an argument with a receptionist rather than the product.

The temptation is to argue with the content. It almost never works, because at this stage the content is downstream of the expression. The person needs somewhere to put it first, and a systematic conversation only afterwards. Any support script built the other way round, correcting facts before absorbing expression, buys an escalation instead of a resolution.

The late anal stage is a different quality altogether: expression according to a system of representations and freedom of choice. The child now selects what to give and how, checking against an internal set of rules that is already forming, instead of pushing everything outward at once.

In business terms this is the customer who reads the proposal, disagrees with clause four, explains why by reference to their own rules, and offers an alternative. It is the one who writes a considered review after a month of use, or recommends you with a caveat attached. All of it is giving, and all of it is chosen. Everything a company actually wants from a relationship (payment, a case study, a referral, an honest objection instead of a silent exit) lives here and nowhere earlier.

The example that survives translation

An adult refused a request at work reacts in one of two basic ways. The first is stuck oral logic: resentment and a sense that the world again failed to give what it owed, with no initiative to change the situation. The second is stuck early anal logic: a sharp, uncontrolled expression of disagreement, a flare-up with no regard for consequence, as though a limit were a personal insult rather than an ordinary part of interaction.

The mature reaction is the late anal position. State the disagreement from your own system of what is fair, and choose the form and the moment of stating it instead of letting it out automatically. Read that with a difficult client in mind and it works as a diagnostic without any adjustment.

Why the order cannot be skipped

These stages are a necessary sequence rather than an arbitrary list. Without the dependence of the early oral period, basic trust does not form, and without basic trust the top-down regulation of the late oral stage becomes anxious instead of curious. Without the experience of meeting a limit in the early anal phase, there is no system to lean on in the late anal one.

An adult who had one of these steps skipped or traumatically compressed usually shows a specific gap rather than a general delay: perfectly able to express disagreement, a late anal competence, while panicking at dependence and at asking for help, an early oral step left unfinished.

Funnels carry the same gap: excellent at handling a negotiated objection, hopeless in the first ten seconds where a stranger has to be able to take something without giving anything back.

What changes when the market is Russia

Three differences matter, and each moves the sequence rather than replacing it.

The taking stage runs longer and ends with a person. In much of Western B2B the path goes from content to a nurture sequence to a self-serve trial, and the buyer crosses from taking to giving without speaking to anyone. In many Russian categories that crossing is mediated: a written commercial proposal, a call, a named contact. The self-serve bridge that a Google-market playbook assumes is often missing, so a page translated from the original and opened with a demo button is addressing a stage that has not arrived.

The first push happens in messengers. In a Western funnel the late oral moment usually leaves a trace, in email or in a logged chat widget. In Russia it arrives in Telegram or WhatsApp, frequently from a personal account and outside working hours. If your measurement counts forms and calls only, this entire stage is invisible, and you will read the audience as colder than it is and cut the Yandex Ads budget that was working.

Expression is public and it is durable. The first act of giving from a Russian buyer is very often a review, and it lands on a company card in search, on a marketplace, or in a Telegram channel, where it stays long after any campaign has ended. Early anal expression in this market is not a private support ticket. It is a permanent object in your search results.

What follows for a company selling into Russia from abroad is practical. Build the taking stage so a stranger can take something real without paying for it in commitment: a price range, a document, a straight answer. Budget for a human being at the moment of the first push, in the channel where it happens. Give expression a place to land that you control, rather than leaving the only surface to a review aggregator. And expect the crossing to giving to take more contacts than your home-market model predicts, because the bridge here is a conversation rather than a checkout.

Reading the stage in front of you

Four questions that place any conversation on the sequence:

1. Can this person act on us at all right now? If they cannot, they are at the early oral position and the only useful move is to give them something worth taking.
2. Is this a push or a complaint? A push tests whether you move. Answer it as a person, not as a policy.
3. Is the expression shaped or unshaped? Unshaped expression gets space first and arguments second. Shaped expression gets a real negotiation.
4. What have they already given? A relationship that has never received anything from the buyer is earlier than your CRM stage says it is, whatever the deal record claims.

The same questions work in self-observation. Catching yourself in a passive wait, or in an uncontrolled burst of disagreement, name the active stage and deal with yourself by its logic instead of measuring yourself against a mythical adult who manages everything at once.

The sequence is a working map rather than an archaic diagram from a textbook: from total dependence through the first bite to expression and finally to choice. Every adult carries all of these layers at once, with a different one surfacing at different moments, and recognising which layer is speaking usually matters more than explaining the episode elegantly afterwards. Applied to a buyer, that recognition decides whether your next message lands or bounces. In customer research for a foreign company entering this market, half the finding is normally the same: the offer was addressed to a stage the buyer had not reached.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: От «беру» к «даю»: как устроены первые два года психики