We are always biased. We always see things from our own perspective.
We’re focused on protecting our own interests.
We get upset when people don’t let us pull out in front of them in traffic and annoyed when someone cuts us off.
We get frustrated when the person in front of us takes too long to order their coffee at Starbucks or aren’t prepared to hand over their passport when they reach the security officer at the airport.
When people don’t respond or act as we expect or want our internal frustration-meter creeps up. But we have no idea that behind their facade, their delay, their selfishness or lack of consideration, or their ‘not-noticing’, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength problems. Their lives may be in turmoil. They may be struggling with pressures or personal obstacles that are consuming their attention.
There’s a Croatian proverb that goes “The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.” I think we have all been guilty of that. I know I have.
We all have bias that we bring to conversations and everyday situations. We don’t often see the other side as clearly as we see our own.
According to American computer scientist Alan Kay, perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That’s worth thinking about. What’s the other person’s perspective?
Remember the last time you complained to your sales manager about your marketing department, ‘I just don’t understand why we never seem to get ….’ [Insert ‘leads’, ‘competitive analysis’, ‘better product positioning’, ‘easy to use sales proposal templates’ or your favorite complaint here].
Have you ever wondered what on earth the product development team spend all their time at, when it seems the competitor has a feature in their product ‘that seems pretty simple to me for us to add’? Surely it can’t be that hard!
When this lack of understanding happens tremendous friction occurs – and overall sales and organizational velocity suffers. Usually when you start a sentence with ‘I just don’t understand why …’, it’s usually just that – you don’t understand. And, more often than not, it’s worth taking the time to try to get the picture as others have painted it.
If you are one of the 50,000,000 sales people in the world you might be more exposed to this than others.
Think about the last time you were frustrated with a customer ‘who just doesn’t get it’. You could be forgiven for thinking that being a customer is easier than being a sales person. All the customer’s got to do is pick a supplier, right? But when the customer makes that buying decision, the risk shifts from the supplier to the customer, and the impact on the customer of a poor buying decision is usually greater that the impact on the salesperson of a lost sale.
For a customer to be comfortable, she must be really sure that the supplier has a deep comprehension of her (sometimes unstated) needs. Uncovering or understanding even your own needs can often be an unyielding search. When that quest is filtered through the lens of another, vision is often blurred, and the picture that emerges is uncertain. In a corporate context, personal and company motives sometimes collide, or at least bring with them varying nuances of aspiration, and a panoply of potential wants and needs explodes. Customers and suppliers, sometimes unknowingly, share the consequent anxiety when they meet in the un-choreographed buy-sell dance.
The important thing to remember from the customers’ perspective is that they don’t really care about your solution. It’s not what they think about every morning when they wake up. So I worry about the focus that some sales and marketing organizations place on product knowledge first instead of worrying deeply about the impact on the customer, and the problems (known and unknown) that the customer has to deal with.
A customer-first approach that we have seen work very well is one where the sales person spends a disproportionate amount of time worrying about what is broken in the customer’s organization, the pressures they are under and the goals that they have. When you and your customer can agree on these then you have earned the right to talk about your solution.
It’s about really committing to removing your solution bias and seeing things from the customer’s perspective. That helps you to focus on what is important to her and protect her interests. It will serve your interests in the end and help you both to see straight.
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Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.