In Sales, It's What You Don't Know That Can Hurt You The Most!

"Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers"

Voltaire

Effective selling is all about asking the right questions and asking powerful questions is undoubtedly a sales professional's most crucial skill. Having the ability to ask insightful questions that draw out a customer's real problems, challenges and goals is the key to offering specific and relevant solutions that hit the mark. 

Questions help us find out not only the issues but also the emotions the customer is feeling around their issues going unsolved. As salespeople, when we ask the right questions, we build our knowledge and evidence to ensure we are making the right decisions on our suggested solutions.

Yet, this is where some salespeople struggle. 

Salespeople can make the mistake of going into a customer interaction with a predetermined idea of what a customer's problems, challenges or goals are. They have seen this type of customer before and assume they know what is important to them. This approach can result in the salesperson jumping the questioning stage and fast-tracking the process and start presenting solutions. Subsequently, there is no buy-in from the customer, as they are propositioned with a solution to a problem they didn't even know they had. Or if the salesperson does ask questions, they ask leading questions, subconsciously looking for a specific answer taking the customer down a path towards their pre-planned solution. When the customer answers positively to the leading questions, the salesperson's predetermined ideas are supported and justified.

Alternatively, they may go into a meeting with all the right intentions. They can ask all the right questions and yet can still get diverted. The salesperson asks a powerful first question that gets the customer talking. As the customer responds, they hear a phrase or a comment from the customer, that triggers an already formulated predetermined idea or point of view! Even though the salespersons objective was clear and their questions planned, this phrase grabs their attention and sends them down a predisposed perspective. There is now enough 'perceived' evidence to support their existing mindset. Just like that all of a sudden, their planned questions and the sales process go out the window. 

These predetermined ideas and assumptions (or biases) can blind a salespersons vision and clarity around a customer's actual problems, challenges or goals. These biases can negatively impact the salesperson's decision making. Especially when they haven't gathered enough evidence through questioning and research, or they make the mistake of relying on predetermined assumptions. 

So how as salespeople do we fight these assumption short-cuts and hone in on isolating and understanding our customer's needs? 

To answer those questions, we need first to understand how, in simple terms, our brain likes to make decisions.

Our human brains are finely tuned decision-making machines, designed to make decisions quickly. With as little effort as possible, using past experiences, it jumps to the most likely conclusion and makes a quick decision. In most of our day to day activities, these mental short-cuts (heuristics) work beautifully. Can you imagine how exhausting it would be if we had to think through every mundane decision we had to make daily: like cleaning our teeth, walking down the street or driving a car? 

The danger, of course, is when these mental short-cuts infiltrate our more complex decision-making activities and hinder our ability to investigate a situation thoroughly and rationally.  

During the 1970s, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman researched the impact of heuristics and subsequent bias and the effect it has on our decision-making capability. Tversky and Kahneman proposed that biases influence how we think and the judgements we make. According to Kahneman "Confirmation bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then, top-down, you force everything to fit that interpretation." In other words, interpreting information in a way that confirms what you already believe. 

"The confirmation bias is so fundamental to your development and your reality that you might not even realise it is happening. We look for evidence that supports our beliefs and opinions about the world but excludes those that run contrary to our own." 

Sia Mohajer

Confirmation bias can be disastrous for salespeople; it can hamper their decision-making ability and blindside them completely. It prevents them from hearing what their customers are telling them, inhibiting their understanding of what is really going on for the customer. The implications can be disastrous, as I mentioned earlier, the salesperson tries to solve a problem the customer doesn't know they have, or they end up solving the wrong problem.

While it's prudent to do your research and to have research-backed potential solutions before talking to a customer, sales professionals need to remember to be open to new information and be ready to admit their educated hypothesis might be incorrect. 

So what can we do to avoid falling victim to confirmation bias in our customer interactions?

Tame the Ego. Our ego wants to build our self-esteem and tell us we are here because of how much we know and how good we are. When we believe we already have all the answers, we stop learning. We need to tame our ego and look to learn all we can from our customers.

"We thought that we had all the answers; it was the questions we had wrong." 

Bono

Stay curious and Listen, Listen, Listen! Start by telling yourself, "I don't know the answer." I may have asked this same question a hundred times to a hundred customers and heard a hundred answers, yet I need to listen as if I am hearing this customer's answer for the very first time. Listen with the intent to understand!

"Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last."

Samuel Johnson

Plan Your Questions and Trust the Process. Asking planned open-ended questions is your way around confirmation bias. Great questions get customers talking and expressing their real issues and their emotions around their problems going unsolved and their goals going unachieved. Ask plenty of probing questions and dig deep into the issue, the more detail you uncover, the more specific and relevant your solution will be. The key is staying the course and trusting the process, don't look for short-cuts.

"Hold the Vision. Trust the Process" 

Unknown

Resisting the pull of confirmation bias starts with self-awareness. Next time you are in a meeting with a customer, focus on being conscious of the customer's answers and your subsequent thought process. Are you taking mental short-cuts based on your customer's responses? What valuable information are you missing?

Remember, In sales. It's what you don't know that can hurt you the most!

Regards,

Peter Edwards