Cognitive Dissonance in Sales: Five Self-biases that hold you back from scaling your revenue

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN SALES: FIVE SELFBIASES THAT HOLD YOU BACK FROM SCALING YOUR REVENUE

If you want to sell in the current market, you should definitely possess a must-have quality – a nimble and flexible sales management approach.

Especially as the market circumstances and buyers mindsetare constantly changing as per the market condition. A sales team or a guy who adapts and leverages these changes will possess a great market advantage.

In this situation, a confused or overwhelmed can easily take wrong decisions. The nature of cognitive dissonance in sales process breeds friction points that will cause customer drop-off.

Ok, let me explain!

By nature, human beings are easily suggestible and highly cognitive beings. Most of us are not equipped to keep up with the pace of the market change.

In short, the human nature plays against us trying to achieve better results.

Your sales process could be limited by an unsophisticated communication and non-verbal cues that give-out to your audience. It can also take the form of wrong decision-making within your sales team.

If you want to achieve better sales results, you should understand and overcome certain limiting factors. Otherwise, it can constrict and strangle the point of view of your business. This may prevent you from making the right decision.

Impact of Cognitive Dissonance in your Sales activities

Mostly, you can see a sales process as a series of micro activities that ends with a deal closure.

Collectively, these are known as a sales process.

These micro activities are also subjected to human biases.

If you don’t have the right insight and ability, you may simply take wrong decisions within your sales process. In the end, this may end-up detrimentally affecting your project.

You can easily overcome this problem through the live tracking of your sales activity.

In this blog, we will discuss about the different ways that you can overcome these cognitive biases to take the right daily decisions.

Without further delay, let us introduce you to the six most common biases that could be affecting your sales turnover. We will also discuss about potential strategies that help you overcome these limiting behaviours and beliefs.

1. Anchoring bias against Flexible approach

It’s normal for businesses or individuals to be attached to the established way of doing things.

Within the specific Industry circumstances, these are known as business workflows. With time, the businesses struggle to change the direction and learn new ways of doing things.

This existing bias against changing the established norms is known as anchoring. This means that your subconsciousis being anchored against any potential changes.

You can see the effects of anchoring in different ways within your sales team.

The information flow within most sales organizations follows a solid top-down hierarchy. Some companies still prefer cold calling over emails and other channels. In certain extreme cases, businesses still rely physical book keeping to manage their accounts.

This poses an active disadvantage for your company or sale team over your competitors.

The anchoring bias will cause inefficiencies within your organization. This will significantly slow down your decision making process.

The modern day sales requires you to achieve all-round better flexibility in your activities.This allows you to establish a more meaningful way of managing your responsibilities.

2. Blind Spot Bias against Discovering Opportunities

Most businesses follow certain established methods to generate leads and turn them into opportunities. Gradually, these businesses will grow to trust and exclusively depend on these processes to drive their business in the forward direction.

But we are living in a fast changing internet marketing industry. Without an open mindset, these businesses may find it difficult to switch and adapt to the ever changing marketing landscape.

If you examine this discrepancy, you can see that the spending on online and offline campaigns are not based on the campaign structure.

This bias can even be found within the internet marketing community. If someone has previously enjoyed wild success with one method, they may be averse to switching to a new channel of marketing.

For example, if someone has success in Google Adwords advertising, they wouldn’t be much interested in other social video channels such as Facebook Live or Snapchat.

The blind spot bias could act to make-or-break your campaign success.

If you are selecting the wrong avenue to spend on opportunity discovery, you will end-up tilting your complete ROI equation against your business.

You can overcome blind spot bias through painstakinglyaccounting the impact and ROI of each marketing campaign. It also enables you to validate the quality of individual leads generated through particular campaigns.

By assessing the quality of each lead, you can ensure that your marketing efforts can be easily modulated and shifted according to the present conditions.

A single stream of incoming leads allows you to precisely understand the situation of your marketing game.

Intuition bias against Data-Centred Approach Let’s face it!

The sales managers are usually not the most enthusiastic group about crunching numbers.

Most Managers approach decision making based on a blend of intuition and market assessment.

This may speed-up the process by having your entire processes managed through snap decisions. It also presents vulnerability within a changing and evolving situation.

There could be a strategy for client meeting, fixing field route or even evaluating sales people.

Let’s just look into a typical decision making triangle.

The right decision making process is a based on intuition and precise information.

With just intuition, your decisions are most likely to fall on the face!

This impulsiveness was the core of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, which is now a cult classic in the science of decision making.

In his book, Gladwell discusses the effect of wrong intuitive bias that leads to bad decisions.

In sales, you are constantly trying to leverage a marketplace with evolving circumstances and changing customer mindset.In this dynamics, an intuitive approach could seldom mean success.

An automated platform enables sales people to comprehend all the available information.

This helps sales people cultivate a data-centered decision making approach within their process. In-turn, this helps you provide a consistent method of decision making.

3. Bias of Traditionalism against process Automation Oh Yeah, this is a pretty sensitive subject.

Businesses still struggle to balance between role of process automation and tradition in their daily sales activities.

When faced with a choice, most people still prefer to go with traditional methods rather than the new processes.

This includes sales people who are still dependent on excel spreadsheets and planners to manage their daily prospects.

Having a high volume of prospects and decreasing conversion have made this system simply impractical.By understanding the simple dynamics of a sales funnel, you need to handle a larger pool of prospects. This is necessary to achieve successful sales figures.

In this situation, a Sales CRM platform can help you garner and streamline opportunities to achieve maximum conversion. In turn, this helps you maximize the number of deal closures.

4. Bias based on Prejudice within workforce Whatever the reason, the existence of prejudice within the workforce is a reality.

Let’s assume that organizations don’t encourage or aren’t even aware of employee prejudices.

It’s still possible to have a prejudice based daily situation.

The prejudice could be based on first-impression or creed. As it comes down to basic human instinct developed through years of societal living, you can’t take unbiased evaluation making for a given.

In the end, it can cumulate into a lack of motivation and employee mistrust.

This bias could be overcome through following strict accountability concerning your employee contributions. You can also evaluate the spike in contributions or decrease in contributions.

In these cases, it may end-up being stacked against your company.

5. Paradox of Choice against Effective Decision Making ‘Paradox of choice’ is not actually cognitive dissonance. It points to human incapability of make decisions when presented with too many options. The paradox of choice has been lauded by many entrepreneurs, including Steve jobs.

When having to consider too many options, you can practically overload your cognitive power.

In this situation, one’s cognitive capability gets practically overwhelmed. Further, the person ends-up being inconclusive or taking the wrong decision.

Now, let’s see how it affects the sales people.

The nature of modern business requires you to constantly handle too many smaller decisions.

This decision making can easily consume your available cognitive power.

Ultimately, this would lead you to being overwhelmedon a daily basis.

By having a business automation platform, you can streamline all information to a single dashboard. This allows you to prioritize and take decisions based on the available data.

For example, let’s consider the life of a sales manager. They need to consider multiple customer negotiations and employee directives on a daily basis.

A sales CRM dashboard gives an overview of all pending decisions and customer quotes. It allows you to arrange and align your daily meetings on a first-on basis.

Conclusion:The 2017 marketplace will require you to navigate large challenges in a shifting landscape. For this, you will need to have a clear mind that’s free from biases.

A completely integrated platform lets you oversee and manage all your selling activities. You also get to keep a pulse on your business through accessing the right data at the right time.

Kapture CRM is an integrated CRM platform that enables you to handle sales, lead management and customer management. Now make sure that you won’t be overwhelmed by your daily proceedings.

Check out our free CRM trial here or Contact our team @ 91-7899887755 or sales@kapturecrm.com