Master These 8 Cognitive Biases, and You’ll Win More Business

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 week, 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! 👇🏽

Master These 8 Cognitive Biases, and You’ll Win More Business

Cognitive bias can be at the root of some of the sales industry’s most frustrating problems. Customers who choose a more expensive solution, even though yours is better, and more cost effective. Buyers who choose the popular solution, even though yours is more suitable. At least from your perspective :)

Understanding how our brains work and the role of cognitive bias can help salespeople navigate these frustrating challenges. And, when you really understand the most important cognitive biases, you can harness them to help people make better decisions.

Inspired by Justin Wright’s “cheat sheet” for mastering 16 cognitive biases, we created one tailored for our industry: The 8 cognitive biases you need to master for complex sales.

(Two of the eight biases. Download the cheat sheet here.)

To learn more about how each of these cognitive biases impacts you, your sales teams, and your customers, check out the links below.

• Cognitive Bias - The Great Self-Deception: White Paper
• Sunk Cost Bias
• Confirmation Bias
• Anchoring Bias
• Bandwagon Effect
• Ikea Effect
• Naive Realism
• Representativeness Bias
• Levels of Processing Bias

Once you understand biases that affect sales, you can learn to counter and  harness them. Corey Morewedge, distinguished faculty scholar at Boston University, specializes in decision making, consumer behavior, and social psychology. He developed a 5-step process for reducing the impact of cognitive bias on your teams:

1. Learn about cognitive biases
2. Learn about the “directionality” of biases
3. Get feedback on your decisions
4. Coach and train your people
5. Watch others making decisions

You can watch my video interview with Morewedge and read the write-up to dive deeper into this.

Then, download our cheat sheet and share it to help you and your teams master the critical biases that impact complex sales. Finally, let me know what you think I left out. Which cognitive biases would you include on the cheat sheet?

This article was first published on the Membrain blog here.