How to use CRM to avoid cognitive biases in sales

What is cognitive biases

Cognitive distortions are mind traps. A person sets himself various attitudes so that things seem more logical, and the choice is more correct. In the case of grandma's pies, you will never find statistics confirming that this particular grandmother's pies tastes better than others. Yet you continue to believe it.

Absolutely all people are subject to some degree of cognitive distortion, and this is normal.

We often need to make a decision as quickly as possible. Previously, the survival instinct demanded this, but even now the issues of life and death depend on speed. To be successful, you need to filter information and act instantly. To do this, our consciousness has come up with cognitive biases that help us choose everything that is important to solve a problem in record time.

Cognitive biases in sales

Cognitive biases are just as important in sales as they are in everyday matters. If you know how your brain works, you better understand your customers, do business, and close deals.

But thinking mistakes can work against you, too, forcing you to make the wrong decisions. Cognitive biases are also encountered when working with corporate portals and databases, in which the emotional component is often supplanted by logic and cold calculation.

Survivor's mistake

Survivor bias is a widespread cognitive bias in which a situation is analyzed only on the basis of positive or just partial data, and negative or complete statistics are overlooked.

Book collections for successful people often appear on the web. And supposedly all millionaires read Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. Many conclude that after reading this work, they will also become rich. But they forget about the millions of people who read this book and didn't make money.

On the basis of the survivor's mistake, the business of those who sell any kind of magic pills is built. These are all kinds of drugs for immortality, success or super-sales that will make you a guru in 1 day and 9,999 rubles.

Survivor's mistake in CRM

Analytics, statistics, data collection and processing - all this helps to avoid the survivor's mistake. The Bitrix24 system helps to combat this distortion by collecting data and avoiding the analysis of an incomplete picture.

Imagine that you are a leader or manager. You look at the sales statistics and you see that most of your winning deals come from B2B companies. You focus on them, completely oblivious to the fact that in the B2C segment you, too, could take almost a large market share with less costs if you slightly changed the business process.

Always look at the big picture, even if you think that analyzing one segment will be enough.

The effect of the recent

Another common cognitive bias is the recent effect. In this case, the person considers recent events to be more significant. It is enough to remember how the names of new people are remembered. When talking to two strangers, you are more likely to remember the last name than the first.

The effect of the recent in CRM

Often new deals and contacts seem more important. Because of this attitude, you can lose sales with a long cycle of closing a deal and a large volume of inquiries.

The manager sends a commercial offer and a contract to the person who just called. New tasks are distracting, and the contact that the employee communicated with a week ago is relegated to the background.

When using CRM, you will not lose old deals and will be able to control their movement along the sales funnel. The system itself will remind you of the importance of a call or letter and will always warn you about deadlines.

Procrastination

Many often leave cases for some indefinite future. This behavior is a trick that allows you to delay the start and at the same time gives the feeling that we are already busy with the problem. This cognitive bias is known to everyone and is called procrastination.

In reality, we are faced with a simple choice: to start or not to start. If you have tasks in which the performer and deadline are defined, there are clear stages and certain actions that bring the final result, you simply will not have time to procrastinate.

A special case of procrastination is fixation. A person cannot continue to work until they wait for a phone call, permission, shipment of raw materials, inspiration. Instead of doing other things, he is in limbo. When nothing useful can be done to somehow solve a problem, it is best to forget about it and do something else.

Procrastination in CRM

The CRM block in Bitrix24 will help in setting up all important stages of the transaction without the subsequent possibility of procrastinating.

Let's say there is a certain deal, divided into stages, which have their own tasks. Closing one stage automatically starts a new one, and a closed task opens the next. And so on until the transaction is completed.

cognitive biases: procrastination in CRM

There are also robots in CRM that allow you to control procrastination. The robot is automatically triggered when a deal reaches a certain status. At the stage of clarifying the information, he can schedule a call, send a letter to the client, send a notification to the manager and deprive him of the opportunity to procrastinate.

Minefield run

Running through a minefield is familiar to everyone. This is the moment when deadlines are running out, there are a lot of things to do, and you are trying to fulfill them as soon as possible. You try to work faster and end up making mistakes more often.

Minefield running in CRM

Thanks to CRM, you can avoid the situation when deadlines are tight. The system will help you to correctly plan your affairs so that they do not overlap. If this happens, you will be the first to know about it and you can avoid problems.

With the help of Bitrix24, we control and distribute the working time of specialists. When plans are set, the employee knows what specific tasks he will be engaged in, and does not waste time on everything. If a manager has an urgent task, he coordinates it through the head of the development department.

Usually in agencies, the process is structured differently: each employee has his own project, while additional tasks constantly appear that need to be completed right now. By implementing a task distribution system, you will protect the specialist's brain. Productivity will increase and procrastination will disappear.

The illusion of transparency

It is often not obvious to experts that terms and situations that they understand will be completely unclear to another person. This cognitive bias is called the illusion of transparency.

It is often found in correspondence. The letter appears to be understandable, but the recipient interprets the information differently. He understands the text in his own way, the result is the effect "I thought it was so obvious." If all participants in the discussion had a single information space, communications would be much more effective.

The illusion of transparency in CRM

CRM makes it easier to deal with misunderstandings. For example, using an extranet in Bitrix24, you can add a client to a discussion, eliminating the loss of information when transferring it from employee to employee.

The spirit of contradiction

Sometimes people think that by some set of rules others are trying to limit their freedom, even if the rules are the same for everyone. This cognitive distortion is called the spirit of contradiction.

The spirit of controversy in CRM

Having a CRM helps maintain a systematic approach. At Bitrix24, the Deals block has been improved. To complete the transaction, you need to move through the stages and fulfill a number of conditions. When performing certain actions, tasks are assigned automatically.

cognitive biases: the spirit of contradiction in CRM

For example, after sending a commercial offer, the status of the deal needs to be changed. To do this, the manager must attach a link to the offer, after which the task "Call the client and control the receipt of the commercial offer" is automatically created. No extra steps are required. It is enough for a manager to carry out a sequence of actions, which will eventually turn into a habit, and get the result.

Loss aversion effect

People do not like negative experiences, so they are more often more upset when they lose things than rejoice when they find them. This effect is called loss aversion.

cognitive biases: the effect of loss aversion

We face this cognitive bias almost every day. Suffice it to recall the situation with waiting for transport. You are waiting for the bus. He still does not exist, but you continue to stand at the bus stop, because so much time has already been spent. Although you could already reach the place on foot.

Loss aversion effect in CRM

In sales, the effect of loss aversion is also often encountered.

There are usually different transaction statuses in CRM. If the deal cannot be closed, it is assigned the status "turbidity" or "lost", and the reason is indicated in the comments. After that, the manager will no longer waste extra time on a muddy deal, treating it based on its status.

The efficiency of work increases, and time is spent on clients with whom the likelihood of concluding a contract is higher.

Killing a fly with a sledgehammer

Any task requires a certain amount of work. If a person does too many actions, then resources are wasted. Killing a fly with a sledgehammer, or amplification, is responsible for these thinking traps.

For example, you need to speak to an audience at a conference. You rehearse your speech over and over again. If you feel the same about how you spent your weekend, then you are killing flies with a sledgehammer. The time costs are the same, but if they are justified for a conference, then they are not for a dinner conversation.

This also includes those cases when a manager takes on more projects than he can accomplish, when a problem is discussed with too many people, when twenty specialists are asked for advice.

Killing a fly with a sledgehammer in CRM

CRM will help if the business processes in the company are clearly structured. For example, there is a commercial proposal template that you need to fill out and send to the client. It doesn't have to check every letter. It is enough to enter the data received after communicating with the customer, click the "Generate" button and send.

Cognitive biases are not uncommon

If you think that cognitive biases do not apply to you, then you are most likely caught in another trap - a blind spot of biases.

Let us explain it using a classic experiment by the psychologist Emily Pronin. She handed out the descriptions of cognitive biases to the subjects and asked them to rate how they saw their behavior in biases on a scale of ten. Additionally, it was proposed to evaluate the average indicators of other participants in the experiment.

The subjects rated themselves at 5, 31 points, and the average value turned out to be 6, 75 points. Each participant in the experiment was confident that cognitive biases affected him less than the average person, but suspected of falling into the trap of thinking of a neighbor.

Cognitive biases are just tools. They can be useful in one context and harmful in another. CRM is also a tool that can help you track down the traps of thinking, go beyond the standard sales approach and achieve new results. But don't rely on CRM alone. It's better to pay more attention to behavioral factors and learn to turn them around in your favor.