The Value of Speed and Objectivity

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Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting ideas or beliefs. It’s also known more colloquially in sales circles as “happy ears”. Confirmation bias feels good because it fills our heads with positive, blissful thoughts. In business, it can also cloud our judgment, turn customers off, erode the accuracy of our sales forecast, and prevent us from seeing critical situations with much-needed objectivity.

Impact on Discovery
Salespeople are generally motivated to drive revenue by winning the business of as many customers as possible. This means that when it comes to discovery calls, the tone of most of those conversations tends to be optimistic and inclusionary. In other words, we start by assuming that the prospect is a good fit for our solution and looking for evidence that proves they are. Hence the confirmation bias. It can also mean that even when a customer isn’t an ideal fit for our solution (either because of our constraints or theirs) we tend to hang on to hope for longer than we should as we continue to look for confirmatory evidence. Unfortunately, this not only wastes precious sales team bandwidth but can impact your win rates as well when poor fit buyers eventually bow out.

In my last two VP of Sales roles, I found there was a italy telegram data high degree of correlation between win rates and the amount of time spent in the discovery phase of the sales cycle. In fact, the relationship across dozens of sales reps in different geographies was clear. The quicker we moved a customer through the discovery phase, the greater our win rate. Essentially, we sold more by losing faster! In my last role specifically, we found that

the time spent in the discovery phase for the deals we won, was 1/3 of the time spent in deals we ended up losing or deading out!

In addition, the sales reps who moved their deals through the discovery phase quicker had 63% higher win rates. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the secret to increasing your win rates is to rush customers through a hastily orchestrated discovery process. Rather, it means ensuring that going into the qualification and discovery process with an objective mindset to help you:

be more focused and move the highest potential customers through quicker and more consistently
weed out poor fit customers more consistently and efficiently to ensure you preserve more bandwidth for high intent buyers.
Interestingly, while many leaders tend to measure the efficiency with which they win deals, some are taking a counterintuitive but highly insightful approach to analyzing their “losing” efficiently as well. At one of my recent sales leadership meetups, one amazing company cited TTL or “Time to Lose” as a key dashboard metric describing the efficiency with which their team loses deals.