Articulate the Reasoning Experts Use

You’d like your staff to be experts about what you sell so the recommendations staff make to shoppers are well-founded. However, if shoppers ask the reasons for the recommendations, watch out the experts don’t lie.
     Researchers at University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, New York University, and University of British Columbia found that product and service experts don’t stay sufficiently familiar with details of their logic. They’re accustomed to giving advice from habit rather than tracing out the details each time. If pinned down by requests for those details, experts often make up reasons for their conclusions.
     What’s worse is that the experts tend to consider the reasons as genuine. They’ll create false memories on the spot and then accept those memories as real. They don’t know they’re lying.
     Staff members identified as experts are proud of the designation and feel accountable for advice they give. When they can’t recall details in their reasoning, they assume it must have slipped from mind. They dig deeper to fill in the gaps, not realizing the deep digging leads their brains to subconsciously create phony recollections.
     Lying to comparison shoppers, even with good intentions, is problematic, so coach your staff to stay aware of their reasoning in making recommendations. Encourage them to take the time to answer shopper questions accurately and completely. Your salesperson may have heard this question hundreds of times, but for the shopper, it might be the first time the question has come up.
     The subconscious lying is more common with “nonalignable” than with “alignable” attributes of products being compared. Alignable attributes are ones possessed by all the products the shopper is choosing among. With a video game system, it might be the capacity of the hard drive. If one system lacks Blu-ray playback capability and the others have it, that would be an nonalignable attribute. In this example, the expert’s false recall would consist of believing all the systems do have a Blu-ray capability.
     Customers who consider themselves experts present a similar problem. According to Duke University research, these customers’ knowledge about the product category is often out-of-date.
     The Duke researchers recommend that salespeople create an incentive for discovering what’s new: “It is clear that you know a lot about this type of product. May I share with you some of the latest versions we have and ask you what benefits you see that these new products hold for our customers?”

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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