The LinkedIn Edge

33Credentials and Credibility

As stakeholders decide if they should meet with you, give you information, move to the next step, evaluate your proposal and business case, compare you to your competitors, and ultimately make the decision to do business with you, they are—consciously and subconsciously—assessing the risk that doing so might harm them.

People Don't Like Change

The number one reason why buyers choose not to move forward with you is not price, product specs, delivery windows, competitors, or any of the things salespeople too often blame. It's the fear of negative future consequences.

Your prospects live with an underlying fear that change will make things worse. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the father of heuristic psychology, writes:

Organisms that placed more urgency on avoiding threats than they did maximizing opportunities were more likely to pass on their genes. So, over time, the prospect of losses has become a more powerful motivator on your behavior than the promise of gains¹.

This safety bias causes your buyer's brain to be more aware of what could go wrong than what can go right. They are hyper‐tuned‐into anything about you that is negative. They gravitate toward safe choices.

Emotional Baggage

Salespeople, as a rule, are not perceived as safe. You pose a threat. Your buyers are worried. “What if we make a change and things go wrong?” They worry that you won't live up to your promises, that you'll disrupt their business, that ...