Chapter 2All Sales Are Won and Lost on Illusions
The one constant – the one stable and consistent aspect of sales negotiations – is that all sales are won and lost on illusions. Each business partner competes primarily based on what they believe about a situation. Let's be honest. Anyone's interpretation of any situation reflects a large portion of wishful thinking and illusions. Think back again to Mr. Anderson's debrief in the introduction. He went into that negotiation believing a certain set of things to be true, but his interpretation clashed with what the buyer, Aurelio, was really thinking.
Without a keen level of situational awareness and System 1 training, salespeople's reading and interpretation of a negotiating context risks being distorted by two dangerous illusions: stability and success.
The stability illusion: When the path to dinner leads to death
Cavepeople learned to follow the tracks of certain animals, because their experience and their inherited oral history kept things simple: some paths led to dinner, while other paths led to death. Their survival depended on knowing the difference.
Their twenty-first-century counterparts on sales teams view their jobs the same way. They develop strategies and sets of behaviours that they can apply over and over in the name of efficiency. But this sense of stability – and the reasoning behind it – is an illusion, especially in a business world undergoing significant transformation. The greater the degree of transformation ...
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