(888) 815-0802Are Your Sales Biases Hurting You?
What are your sales biases? Are you even aware that you have sales biases? And how are they hurting your productivity?
One of the primary reasons salespeople stop improving and start struggling is that they begin to believe that they know what they are doing and stop learning.
I know it sounds strange to say it, but in some ways, experience can be a salesperson’s downfall. The salesperson who believes that they have it all figured out and who believes that the path to success is based on replicating their previous experiences time and time again is in for a wake-up call. Once you think that you know absolutely everything there is to know about your prospects, their business, their requirements, and their motivations, your sales biases kick in.
The problem is that your prospects and customers exist in a constantly evolving world and, in turn, are changing their requirements and behaviors in response to it. Your prospects will change in response to the actions you take to sell to them. The salesperson with the static worldview will suddenly find themself on the outside looking in.
It’s perfectly natural for salespeople to develop an experience or sales bias. The dictionary says that a bias is “the inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of (possibly valid) alternatives.” In this case, the biased salesperson assumes from a limited sample set of experiences and success that all customers for their product have the exact requirements, evaluate products the same way, make decisions in the same fashion, and can be sold in the same manner. When sellers reject change to their view of their sales world, they begin to slide down the proverbial slippery slope.
How many sales biases do you have?
Sales is not the only job where this experience-based bias slows down desired outcomes. My wife is a medical educator and attended a workshop at a professional conference where researchers discussed a study of doctors. They identified 125 possible biases, pre-dispositions that doctors unconsciously use as filters when evaluating and diagnosing patients.
Think about this the next time you visit a doctor. Based on their accumulated experiences with previous patients, the physician will pass your description of your symptoms through their filter of 125 possible biases before they arrive at their diagnosis. A story was recounted of a physician whose standard response to any patient with a particular set of symptoms was to say, “Oh, when they say that, they are always lying.” The impact of these biases can be deadly as life-threatening problems get overlooked and go undiagnosed because the doctor always examines them through the lens of their biases.
While selling is not nearly as severe as medicine, your desired sales outcomes can be negatively affected similarly by your experience bias. Do salespeople have 125 possible biases at work in their selling? Possibly. How about this classic sales bias? “Those are bad sales leads. I can tell by looking at them” (even though you didn’t.)
Don’t let your sales biases keep you from learning
The difficulty with sales biases is that they become molded into absolutes in the salesperson’s mind. As a result, even experienced salespeople stop genuinely listening and learning from their prospects and customers.
To ensure that your experience biases aren’t slowing you down, you must consciously acknowledge and fight them. Every prospect and customer is unique. A sales interaction with a prospect shouldn’t be like watching an episode of your favorite TV show for the 30th time in which you can recite every line of dialog. Don’t assume in advance that you know what the prospect will say.
Think of your sales experience as a work-in-progress that is never completed. Treat every sales situation as an opportunity to learn something new about your prospects and their business.
What sales biases do you have in your selling?
