Tell me if you recognize this conversation between you and a veteran member of the sales team:

You: “I just found out that Customer AB, who has been with us for years, has decided to go with the competition. I thought you were on top of this account? You tell me that you know what is going on and that you know the “players”….what happened?”

Veteran Salesperson:…..(silence)…(disbelief)..and… “but I do know them”; I have been doing business with them for a long time! This can’t be true. I know them. They would have told me if they were going to make a change. I need to find out what is going on. How did you get this information? Who told you?

You: “The buyer who we have done business with for years.”

Veteran Salesperson: “This can be true. I know them. They are committed to us and our solution. Something has changed. I need to find out.”

It’s not a comfortable conversation, but it happens every day. You think you know a customer, then this happens, and everything you thought you knew is wrong. Or was it?

Did you know your customer? Were your perceptions about them accurate? What if your perceptions were inaccurate all along?

Salespeople’s perceptions of their customers are often biased and, therefore, subject to inaccuracy. In their research, “Delusive perception – antecedents and consequences of salespeople’s misperception of customer commitment,” Christian Homburg, University of Mannheim, Torsten Bornemann, University of Stuttgart, and Max Kretzer explored the misperceptions of customer commitment by salespeople. With a sample of over 230 buyer-seller relationships, the results highlighted the customer, connection, and salesperson-related effects on the misperception of customer commitment. They also revealed that when salespeople have an overly optimistic perception of customer commitment, the salesperson will spend less time on relationship building, which negatively affects customer behavior.

We all know the importance of personal interactions in delivering customer benefits. However, due to limited resources, salespeople must decide how much time they will spend with each customer daily. When deciding where to put their sales effort outside the competitive landscape and the customer’s potential value to their company, a salesperson must rely on their impressions to measure a customer’s commitment.

Salespeople’s impressions are essential. They form a “more or less accurate impression of their customers” (Weitz). Moreover, they are the first and most fundamental stage of the sales process—mistakes here will impact the rest of the process. So why do we have so much difficulty forming these initial impressions?

Because we are human…….

Personality and social psychology research show that humans are usually inaccurate in their perceptions of other humans. This human inability to accurately perceive others is at the heart of your salesperson’s misperception of your customer’s commitment. In their study, Homburg, Bornemann, and Kretzer found that in over 62% of the “observed relationships,” the salesperson’s perception of customer commitment was inaccurate.

So what do you do? Here are some recommendations:

1. Please don’t assume your salespeople accurately perceive customer commitment. Carefully scrutinize each relationship. Prompt your sales team to constantly question existing impressions of their customers’ commitment. Look to customer data to help validate beliefs.
2. Work on “opener” abilities. Opener ability is getting customers to “open up” and share information.
3. Identify customers who exhibit more extraordinary relationship-related activities. These are the customers who are most likely to share crucial relationship-building information. As a result, they can be your closest allies in the marketplace.
4. Add “attachment style” measures to your customer surveys and customer service follow-up. Work to determine if your customers support or oppose attachment (aka commitment) to your company.
5. Work on the “acquaintance effect” in the customer-salesperson relationship. Salespeople become more accurate in their perceptions as their acquaintance level increases with a customer. As a result, avoid rotating salespeople at the buyer’s desk. Instead, encourage long-term relationships with your salespeople and your customers.
6. Adopt a systematic approach when transitioning customers. For example, have the new salesperson work with and accompany the veteran salesperson to enable an effective transfer of a customer.
7. Don’t “over cover” a customer. This one even surprised the researchers. They discovered that if a customer receives excessive coverage, the perception of the salesperson is reduced. In addition, they identified two areas that may contribute to the inaccurate perception:
   • High-pressure sales tactics. In this situation, salespeople spend more time persuading customers to buy rather than developing an accurate understanding of them, and they are less receptive to buyers’ cues.
   • Nuisance salesperson. Quality time versus quantity. If you are there too much, buyers don’t share as much.
8. Hire skilled, adaptive salespeople. Salespeople experienced in adaptive selling are generally more receptive to customer cues and can gather more information, improving their perception accuracy. Therefore, sales coaches should work with these salespeople to detect customer behavior cues.
9. Watch out for the “veteran-effect”. This phenomenon shows up in your more experienced salespeople. More often than not, it is tied to overconfidence. Research shows that overly confident salespeople are more interested in preserving their perceptions than assimilating and processing new information.
10. Consider adding customer relationship-building outcomes to your compensation incentive plan—such as a customer’s effort to maintain and strengthen the relationship.

The research is compelling. It further supports the notion that the tactics and strategies of the old economy are irrelevant in Economy 2.0. Instead, to succeed in high performance, sales teams must be armed with the latest information on sales performance and supported by leadership that connects, collaborates, and coaches.