Want to Win More Deals? Fit Your Mental Model to Reality

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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! 👇🏽

Want to Win More Deals? Fit Your Mental Model to Reality

In the sales world, we talk a lot about growing your pipeline, qualifying prospects, and closing deals. But if you really want to get out of a rut and win more deals, what you have to do is evaluate your mental models and fit them more accurately to reality.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine a CRM salesperson talking with a new prospect who has just engaged in a product demo. The potential customer tells the salesperson, “I love it. I can really see this working for us.”

After the call, the salesperson thinks to themselves, “Wow, this sale is going to be easy to close! The customer already knows it’s going to work for them.”

A few weeks later (no next meeting was booked in the excitement of the moment) after a few follow-ups by the salesperson, the prospect goes cold and stops responding. What happened? The salesperson’s mental model didn’t match reality, and they lost the sale as a result.

What Is a Mental Model?

A mental model is an internal representation of something in the real world. For instance, you have a mental model for how your car operates. That mental model probably matches reality pretty closely, or you wouldn’t be able to drive your car.

On the other hand, you may have a mental model for how your engine works that does not match reality. This mental model doesn’t have to be accurate in order for you to drive your car, but it does matter for maintaining it. You can imagine that you have hamsters living under your hood running on a wheel that drives the car forward and that gasoline is liquid hamster food. If you never look under your hood, you could drive your car for quite a while with this mental model until you ran out of oil and your car stopped working.

If you were really committed to your mental model, you could hear the engine clunking and think that the hamster wheel must be off balance. When the mechanic tells you that you ran out of oil, you could imagine that the wheel had grown rusty. When they tell you what it will cost to replace the engine, you could concoct a conspiracy theory to explain to yourself how mechanics are in cahoots to hide the truth of how inexpensive hamsters are so they can make millions off of you.

As absurd as this example is, that is exactly how confirmation bias works, and it’s a real problem for humans and for salespeople in general. Confirmation bias is what happens when you lose that sale and instead of questioning your assumptions about what happened, you use the incident to confirm dysfunctional mental models such as “I’m terrible at sales and should quit,” “Customers are stupid,” or “I just need to get lucky like my colleague.”

In this video from Cabrera Labs, Derek Cabrera and Laura Cabrera talk about mental models and a concept they developed called the Upthink Loop, which can help us match our mental models to reality (and counteract confirmation bias).

“There’s what you think, and then there’s what is real,” says Derek. “Ideally, you want those things to be in alignment. When our mental model is aligned with reality, then our actions will get better results.”The Upthink Loop is profoundly simple: Test your assumptions, refine, test again, refine, and test again, for the rest of your life.

There’s what you think, and then there’s what is real. Ideally, you want those things to be in alignment. ~ Derek Cabrera, Cabrera Lab

It requires a person to be curious, humble, and willing to change their mental model over and over to become more and more in alignment with reality. It requires us to love what is real more than we love being right.

And when we can do that, then we get better results. “What you don’t want to do is go the other direction,” adds Derek. “Confirmation bias is doing the loop in the opposite direction, where you’re fitting reality to your mental model.”

How to Apply the Upthink Loop in Sales

Confirmation bias is a major problem in sales. Applying the Upthink Loop is the remedy. It turns the confirmation bias loop backwards, and allows us to continually get closer to reality.

Here’s how that can play out in sales. Imagine the salesperson I mentioned at the beginning. They have had the experience described, where they thought the customer was on board and ready to buy, then the customer went cold.

Instead of using the incident to confirm their belief that customers are stupid, that they are unlucky, or that they should quit now since they can’t even close an “easy” sale, they can use the Upthink Loop. Using the Upthink Loop, they can conclude that their mental model for that customer was wrong. This can cause them to rethink their assumptions about the customer. When the customer said “I love it!” and “I can see this working,” the salesperson thought that meant that the customer was ready to buy. But now they know that wasn’t actually what it meant, or even if they meant it, that one person’s opinion was not enough to make a company-wide decision.

Knowing this, the salesperson can now ask better questions the next time. Imagine the salesperson on a new call, and the potential customer says, “I love it!” Instead of assuming the sale will be easy, the salesperson can use that as a launch point to ask more questions.

Questions like:

• What do you love about it?
• What don’t you love about your current situation?
• Where do you see challenges in potentially implementing it?
• Who do you need to convince internally in order to make this purchase?
• What other solutions are you considering? How do they compare?
• Do you have hamsters under the hood of your car?

These types of questions (except for the last one, of course :) will help the salesperson to understand reality and then match their mental model to that reality. They might discover that although the customer loves Membrain, they have a strong internal champion for one of our competitors. Now we have a more accurate mental model than “they love it and are going to buy it.” Now the mental model includes, “this stakeholder loves it but another stakeholder may have more influence in the decision and has a prior bias toward a competitor.”

Now, we can have a much more effective process that incorporates more stakeholders and helps align the customer with our product to make the sale.

Tell me, are your salespeople curious, humble, and willing to change their mental models? What can we do to help them be more of those things?

This article was first published on the Membrain blog here.