To understand others, you must understand yourself.

One of most overlooked factors I see when I look at company website and messaging is bias.

You’ll want to dig into consumer behavior (bias being just a small component) if you want to better understand why your own marketing works or doesn’t work.

Bias either drives or stifles demand for your product or service.

What preconceived notions does your prospect have when they first visit your site? Are you addressing them head on? Most companies don’t even really know what that means.

I’ll often hear VP’s of Sales say things like this to their marketing peers: “Just get me in front of them. That’s all I need you to do“

Today, you can no longer rely on that connection being made in the first place. The CEB shows that 57% of the buying decision is already made before the prospect ever reaches out in the first place.

This makes it an especially difficult problem to detect. How are you to deal with biased prospects who never speak up?

Address their bias!

You have to overcome objections and address bias before it comes up in a conversation. Otherwise, these conversations are never likely to start at all.

Understanding bias can revolutionize your connection with the customer in the vital time before they decided reach out to speak with you.

Buster Benson one-upped Wikipedia with his Medium post on Cognitive Bias.

He explains a part of his process on unpacking the complex psychological subject of bias here:

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

Read Buster’s article: https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.lqnfv2c4r