Complex sales: testing your interpretation of the customer's need
In high-value-added selling, an initial explanation of a customer's need can quickly shape the entire proposal. The management question is specific: how can managers check that the team tests this explanation rather than selects evidence that supports it?
What the literature establishes
Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper (1979, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) examined how people with opposing views on capital punishment evaluated conflicting research findings. Participants tended to evaluate evidence consistent with their initial position more favourably, and exposure to the same information could increase their differences. This study does not concern selling, but it establishes a risk relevant to sales diagnosis: new information is not necessarily assessed independently of an existing belief.
Considering the alternative explanation
Charles G. Lord, Mark R. Lepper and Elizabeth Preston (1984, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) tested instructions asking participants to consider a possibility contrary to their initial judgement. In their experiments, this approach reduced the biases under study more effectively than a simple instruction to be fair and impartial. A sales application would be to formulate another plausible explanation of the need, then seek a fact that helps distinguish between the two interpretations.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that salespeople should routinely be contradicted or that customers' statements should be doubted. That would confuse testing a hypothesis with adopting a distrustful stance. A customer requesting automation, for example, may want to reduce administrative work or improve traceability: these objectives can coexist, but they do not necessarily lead to the same proposal. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not establish
These social psychology experiments demonstrate neither increased sales nor more relevant B2B proposals. Nor do they establish how much verification is necessary before proposing a solution. A purely ritual internal objection is not a test: the team must specify which observation would genuinely lead it to revise its interpretation.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources' « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, a proposed exercise in Sion is to record the assumed need, an alternative explanation and a fact to check with the customer for every proposal reviewed. In discussions with organisations in hydropower, healthcare, viticulture and Alpine tourism, that fact could concern, respectively, a maintenance constraint, an approval process, a seasonal task or an operational difficulty. The measure is the proportion of reviewed proposals whose records contain, before submission, a dated customer response to the planned test and a decision to retain or revise the diagnosis. This indicator checks a working discipline, not yet its effect on sales. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: High-Value Selling in Sion
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