What psychology tells us about being a better sales leader

It's time for another edition of the?Art & Science of Complex Sales!?If you're new, this is where we talk about all things related to putting HOW you sell at the core of your business -- from sales process execution to best practices in sales coaching to driving winning behaviors to enabling growth in your sales organization.

Every Tuesday, I share ONE idea or strategy that sales leaders and teams can use to enable consistent growth for their organization. Whether you're a sales leader, sales consultant, sales manager, sales enablement expert or sales team member ready to accelerate your performance -- you'll find one action item that you can implement each week to get you one step closer to your goals.

My mission is to elevate the sales profession with technology and partnerships, so that we can all improve our sales effectiveness and raise the bar in sales.

Now, onto this week's topic!

What psychology tells us about being a better sales leader

As sales professionals, it’s easy to think about our jobs in terms of numbers: Quotas, forecasts, and commissions leading the way. It’s easy to forget the human side of things, and when you operate in a complex b2b world, it’s even easier to get caught up in technical details.

But at the end of the day, the numbers don’t happen without humans, and sellers don’t sell unless they connect with other humans. This means that people who understand the psychology of being human have an advantage in sales.

I was thrilled to talk with?Howard Brown , the founder and CEO of Revenue.io and a former clinical psychologist, to talk about human psychology and what it has to teach us about becoming better salespeople and better sales leaders. Here’s what he had to say.

Sales leaders must become more self-aware

Cognitive bias is a major feature of human psychology that salespeople and their leaders must understand in order to be more effective. We’ve explored the topic of cognitive bias extensively in this blog, and one of the things that Brown added to the conversation is that it’s especially important for sales leaders to be self-aware of their own biases.

This is difficult because of the “bias bias” - that is, the cognitive bias that makes it easy for us to see bias in others and hard to see it in ourselves. But as a manager, it’s critical to overcome the “bias bias” and introspect to find your own weaknesses and biases.

“Great coaches have the wherewithal, the time, and the energy to do the work themselves, to look at themselves and see their own biases,” says Brown. “If I have a leader stuck in confirmation bias, who always has to be right, then I’m going to have a hard time taking feedback from them about my own biases.”

Recording calls and interactions is a powerful tool for self-awareness

I asked Brown to share some of the most important things he’s brought to his work with salespeople from his former work as a clinical psychologist. He talked about his early days as a psychologist, working under the supervision of a more seasoned professional.

Selling to people is often largely about reducing a sense of threat.

~ Howard Brown

His supervisor would record his sessions with clients, and play them back. He noticed how, when certain topics came up, he would develop a twitch, or how he sometimes projected onto the client.

“I realized that by watching myself perform, and having someone I trust to point things out and patterns that I had, I was able to analyze myself and improve my performance,” he says.

He adds that it’s important to be able to have coaches who can talk about examples of when they’ve made the same mistake, so that salespeople learn from example rather than from preaching.

Cognitive bias can increase or decrease a sense of “threat” in interactions

In an?earlier conversation ?with Carey Morewedge, Morewedge called confirmation bias the “mother of all biases.” Brown says that in the millions of conversations they’ve recorded using their technology, Ring DNA, it is indeed the one that is most often identified.

Confirmation bias is the tendency of humans to seek information and explanations that support things that they already believe.

Confirmation bias is responsible for another commonly understood phenomenon, which is the power of first impressions. Whatever a buyer thinks about you within the first few seconds of meeting for the first time - that impression will inform the rest of the relationship, because the buyer’s confirmation bias will drive them to look for confirmation of that initial impression in everything you do and say.

For managers, this is incredibly important to understand and combat, because confirmation bias can lead to misunderstanding salespeople on the team, in turn leading to conflict and inability to coach effectively.

But Brown brings up another powerful application for understanding confirmation bias in first impressions. He says that selling to people is often largely about reducing a sense of threat. Buyers who feel threatened by a salesperson are unlikely to buy from them. Likewise, if they’re afraid of the product or afraid of change, they are less likely to buy.

On the other hand, if they trust the seller and feel confident that the change is good for them, they are very likely to buy.

Confirmation bias comes into play here because salespeople must be aware that the customer’s first impression of them will stick with them. And if the first impression is one of threat, then the seller will face an uphill battle all the way to try to get the buyer to buy.

For this reason, it’s really important for salespeople to know how to present themselves as friendly and helpful in the first few seconds, and to ask open-ended questions that help the buyer feel safe in sharing more information.

In the same context, Brown brings up another cognitive bias,?Parkinson’s Law of Triviality . This law says that people and organizations have a tendency to focus excessively on relatively trivial issues.

In sales, this means that a buyer may get stuck on what the seller sees as a trivial detail. But to the buyer, it’s very important. Sellers must learn to hear when the buyer has become stuck in Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. And they must learn how to avoid heightening the buyer’s sense of “threat.”

If the seller tries to convince the buyer that the trivial matter is unimportant, the buyer’s sense of threat goes up, and the chance of the sale goes down. The seller may be “right” about the matter being trivial, but that will be cold comfort when the sale is lost.

If instead the seller recognizes the buyer’s concern as valid and seeks to address it, the buyer’s sense of trust and comfort goes up, and the likelihood of the sale goes up with it.

Avoid overwhelm by knowing the biases common in your realm

There are?hundreds of cognitive biases , and it would be impossible to thoroughly understand and study all of them. For this reason, it’s important to make yourself and your team aware of the biases that most affect your industry, buyers, and company.

Confirmation bias is common everywhere, but there are others that may be more or less common depending on your position.

For instance, because my product is positioned against a major platform that everyone knows the name of, I run into the bandwagon effect a lot. People like my competitor’s product because everyone else uses it, and it feels less risky to them for that reason. In order to sell my product, I have to make people aware of the bandwagon effect, and counter its influence to help them understand why they should choose my product instead.

Every sales team may have different cognitive biases to fight, depending on many factors.

You can fight cognitive bias and use psychology to your team’s advantage

Morewedge, in my?earlier conversation , outlined a path for overcoming cognitive bias, and Brown presents a tool.

According to Morewedge, one of the keys to overcoming and harnessing cognitive bias on a sales team (or anywhere) is to understand cognitive bias. And another tool is to witness people experiencing cognitive bias and making good and bad decisions in its presence.

Brown’s company, Ring DNA, offers a tool that records sales calls and applies learning models and AI to surface what it calls “moments” - i.e., critical moments in the sales process when the salesperson could have made a better choice or taken a more effective action.

It can identify moments such as when the rep isn’t asking enough questions, is talking over the questions, or is falling prey to biases such as attention bias, ambiguity effect, projection bias, and more.

Once the moments are surfaced, coaches can review the video and audio with salespeople to coach and help them compensate for and use their cognitive biases for better results. It can also surface moments when the customer is using a cognitive bias, so that salespeople can learn to notice and counter bias.

Brown says these tools become even more important in complex sales when you’re interacting with large buying committees with many key stakeholders, when one detractor can blow the whole sale.

“If you can master the people aspect, understand what moves them, what causes pain, and how cognitive bias impacts their decisions,” says Brown, “then the game of sales becomes so exciting.”

Learn more about Howard Brown and Revenue.io and connect with him on LinkedIn.

You can read more about cognitive bias on the Membrain blog here .

----

This article was first published on the Membrain blog here: https://www.membrain.com/blog/what-psychology-tells-us-about-being-a-better-sales-leader