What are you watching on TV these days? It’s a trick question because your response should be that you are too busy working and closing deals. Make sure you save that answer the next time your manager asks you if there are any shows you are binge watching currently.
I do not actually watch much TV myself, but I got back into a series I used to watch called House. It’s a show about an unpleasant but brilliant doctor named House where he uncovers the right diagnosis for some obscure ailment that miraculously saves the life of the patient. However, in the process, he and his team nearly kill the patients jumping to conclusions with a series of wrong diagnoses and treatments.
Last week I shared a tweet about VP’s of Sales that fit with the theme of the Super Bowl. It was a pretty good dunk, but a better one would have been this one:
Some of the most iconic Disney cartoons borrowed whole scenes from previous cartoons. You would not notice the copies until you see them side by side like in the tweet. In the same way, VP’s of sales rarely change their playbook, they just lift and shift their playbook to other companies assuming that if it works in one place, it works in every company. It’s just sales after all, how different can it be?
In both the case of House and of VP’s of sales, what you are seeing is a cognitive bias called jumping to conclusions, otherwise known as inference-observation confusion. There are three aspects of this bias:
Mind reading – Belief of having special knowledge of the intentions or thoughts of others.
Fortune telling – Belief of how things will turn out before they happen.
Labeling – Generalizing all the members of a group based on the characteristics of some.
We all fall into this trap because the way our minds process and categorize information. In most cases, our brains are performing a useful function because it filters out the noise and focuses only on the most relevant information. This behavior forms the basis for how we learn new things so we can react faster when faced with similar situations in the future. Once you have learned a process, encountered an objection, or generated a report, you will be more competent in handling the situation next time.
What the mind is doing is building patterns for us subconsciously. When the pattern matches a situation, our mind recalls the pattern and uses that as a short cut for responding. Without this ability, it is not likely that humans would have advanced much beyond cave people. We would be less likely to avoid danger, less able to develop and pass along knowledge, and less able discover and invent.
The same mechanism can also lead us to make rash or uninformed decisions. I most often see this in sales managers that manage to the numbers in their reports without taking into context differences in territories and markets. Another common error is thinking the same uses cases and problems exist across all industries. The differences can be vast, which is why many companies eventually develop industry specific products and teams to service those specific needs.
Jumping to conclusions is one manifestation of these subconscious patterns. The mind formulates assumptions of new events and interactions based on historical patterns, which leads us to generalize, predict future outcomes, or ascribe intentions of others based on our presumed understanding.
As an example, how often do we say a deal is ready to close just to have the deal collapse suddenly? Or how often do we cast the sourcing personnel as villains looking to sabotage our deals? How about those times when we psychoanalyze the reasons why a decision maker that was friendly is now avoiding all outreach? These are just some of the many situations I have seen where jumping to conclusions leads sales professionals astray.
A friend of mine can often be heard saying that salespeople are “paid to be paranoid”. And much like the fictional Doctor House, he was also fond of saying that customers lie. I am not sold on his dark view of the world, most people operate on the desire to cooperate. However, being paranoid is a useful mechanism for helping you avoid jumping to conclusions, the type that makes you blind to weak spots in your sales efforts.
How do you channel paranoia to help you make clearer and more informed decisions? You need to be willing to ask yourself tough questions and being upfront with the answers. There are four questions that can help you examine situations from a more dispassionate perspective:
What do I not know? This is a good question to help strategically understand the situation and elevate gaps and whitespace in the knowledge of the deal, your contacts, and the account. Often I like to go to a whiteboard to help visualize and organize these gaps.
Does this gap matter? Once you know what gaps exist, it is time to prioritize them. Not all gaps will matter or have a material effect of removing a blocker or building a key relationship or solidifying your position in an account. Focus on what advances the deal.
Who has the knowledge to fill those gaps? Find the people or the resources that can help fill in the gaps. This may take some investigation, but if you have an internal champion, this person can usually help or know the team or person to reach out to.
How soon do you need to fill the gap? Sometimes a gap is a constraint on moving forward in a deal like a legal or security review. If the delay in getting an answer takes too long, that can impact the timeframe for closing the deal or risk losing the deal altogether.
While you can ask these questions to yourself, I highly recommend that you find a colleague or your manager to participate in this exercise. When left on our own to do this self-examination, we tend to not be as forthright and exacting in our analysis. Having another person involved to probe and push will force you to be more thorough and honest in your answers. If you are the one helping a salesperson through this analysis, be firm on asking “why does that matter” or “how does that impact the deal” and press them for detailed responses.
More broadly, build a habit of questioning whether you are making assumptions when you do not have data or evidence. Gut instinct or wild guesses can feel good and there is plenty of that type of sales bravado in abundance. Sometimes it is worth taking a flyer, but having the discipline to ask the tough questions will enable you at least know when you are making a feel-based or data-driven decision.
Before signing off this week, I am relaunching Enterprise Sales Forum events on Clubhouse. If you have not heard, Clubhouse is an audio only social media app that feels like the cross between Meetup.com and Twitter. There are rooms where folks are invited to speak and anyone can ask to be called up as one of the speakers It is freewheeling and the quality of these conversations is quite high.
For the past year, we have experimented with various formats with modest success. However, video felt like an awkward platform with the performance issues and clunky interfaces that took away from the experience of learning from others, connecting with peers, and sharing ideas. Clubhouse is about the closest that I have found that replicates what makes Enterprise Sales Forum events worthwhile.
The first event will be Thursday at 12 PM EST in the Enterprise Sales Forum room and you can follow me at “startupmark”. The two important notes is that the app is iPhone only for now and it still requires an invite. If you have an iPhone and have access or know someone that can invite you however, I look forward to having you join us from wherever you are in the world!
Mark Birch, Founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum
⭐⭐Check out this awesome Chrome extension to find the best LinkedIn hashtags for your social selling LinkedIn posts! Download now and let me know what you think ⭐⭐
If you found this essay personally helpful, I encourage you to sign up for the weekly Enterprise Sales Forum Newsletter where I share my thoughts on the state of B2B sales, practical tips for improving your sales acumen, and upcoming sales talks across the global Enterprise Sales Forum community.