For the past many months I’ve been pondering how people make decisions. For years in our sales training I’ve taught, based on my belief, that coming to a decision is a very individual process. To be effective as salespeople we need to discover how each individual, or organization, makes decisions. I truly believe that it’s unique to each individual and to each organization. From an Enneagram perspective, I clearly see that type certainly plays a role as well.
Decision making seems to be an area in sales that is difficult for some salespeople to master, especially now that there are so many options and price shopping is inevitable. I truly believe this new reality has impacted how, when, and why people make buying decisions. For sure, people are still spending money, and lots of it, but there’s a new gestalt about how those decisions happen. Several weeks ago I was having a discussion with a confidant about how I was approaching making an important personal decision. She said to me… “You’ve heard the saying, decisions aren’t made; they are discovered, right?” Actually, it was a new saying to me, but, I knew in that moment, it was a spot-on statement.
This week I’ve been reading The Happiness Makeover by M.J. Ryan (a good book with a bad title). The author cites research findings on how increasing the number of options we have can actually make us feel bad about what our final decisions are in any given situation because we have more to be regretful about because of the options we did not choose. She also goes on to say that “we are less happy with decisions because we have so many options to choose from.” That too was something that I hadn’t considered, yet I can see how this is an important part of the decision making puzzle. I’m still working on what the implications of these new discoveries are in terms of sales, but I’m starting to figure it out and those of you who I coach will be hearing more as I discover-uncover the layers of these learnings for me.
Some questions to consider this week:
- What is the cost of each choice we make?
- If we choose one thing over another, or over many others – what are we walking away from?
- How do you know which to choose?
- Does possible regret play a part in our decisions?
- What is the cost of making no decision at all?
I’d love to hear from you about this topic. In the meantime, I’m still working through my personal decision. I’ll fill you in when I discover it!
Mary Anne Wampler
