Cognitive Bias in the Sales Cycle
- Bill Woodring
- Jul 19, 2019
- 3 min read
Objections are often taken personally by a sales person, but that need not be the case. When you look dispassionately at a prospect’s objection to your product or service you get to the root of why they don’t see the advantages.
At the root of objections is cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is a “mistake in reasoning, evaluating, remembering, or other cognitive process, often occurring as a result of holding onto one's preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information” (1). To understand cognitive bias, we need to consider a process psychologists call heuristics. Merriam Webster defines heuristics as: of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (such as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance. AI is an attempt have a machine replicate this human process, but humans have unique complexities. An AI algorithm learns in a vacuum. It only processes the data it is given and has no personal or emotional “baggage” to shade how it teaches itself.
Humans are not a clean slate. We have learned experience that is all our own and it influences every decision we make good or bad, correct or incorrect. These influences manifest in cognitive bias. There are many cognitive biases and not all are applicable to a sales environment. We look at others later.
A typical cognitive bias is “confirmation bias” which “is the tendency to seek only information that matches what one already believes” (1). We see this all the time and if we are being honest, we do it ourselves. This bias is often faced by people in a sales role: don’t confuse me with the facts I’ve made up my mind.
Confirmation bias was known to the ancient Greeks and written about by the classical historian Thucydides, who observed that people “entrust to careless hope” what they wish to be true. By contrast, they “use […] reason to thrust aside” what they do not. (2)
That seems backward. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow addresses this incongruity in what he called System 1 and System 2.
"System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
He goes on in more depth:
“Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”
There is a nuance here for a sales person. Counter-intuitively, making a prospect a little uncomfortable will work in your favor. Of course, there is a fine line between offering factual, reasoned information to challenge entrenched thinking and making someone angry. But for the sake of this discussion we will assume you have a finely tuned emotional quotient and can quickly perceive the difference.
How do we get a prospect to use the deliberative side of their brain, to think logically about the proposed solution we are offering? We need to have a well thought out narrative that is factual and logical so it will become necessary for them to discard intuition and emotion. The narrative provides information that persuades the prospect to slow down and rethink a firmly held, though illogical, belief.
We will talk more about cognitive bias and narratives next time.
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