The Selling Collective: The Fourth Emergency Service for Sales

The Role Bias Plays in Discovery and Selling

Deals don’t just stall because of competition or pricing. They die because sellers, despite their best intentions, fall victim to invisible biases that distort everything they hear. The result? Misdiagnosed problems, wasted pipelines, and buyers who quietly walk away.

The craft of sales discovery should be the sharpest tool in your sales process.

Good sales discovery isn’t just about asking good questions, it’s about uncovering the painful truth of the problems the buyer is really experiencing, and how that manifests itself and the risks of not solving that problem across the organisation.

However most salespeople fail to uncover that underlying and broad pain.

For many teams, discovery is where deals quietly go to die. Not necessarily because of poor skills, lack of training, but because of the silent deal killer.

Why? Because our own personal biases seeps into our thinking process.

Not deliberately, but subtly and insidiously. It distorts what we really hear, how we interpret buyer signals, and the conclusions we jump to.

4 Biases That Kill Deals (and How to Spot Them)

Sellers and buyers are human. That means they both bring assumptions into conversations. They tend to interpret each others comments through a familiar and comforting lens, and will often hear what they want to hear.

The result? The real problems and pain are not discovered or misunderstood. Sellers risk failing to quantify the pain and how it flows across the buying organisation. In other words, the total cost of the problem to the business.

For example, here are some of the most common biases in discovery:

• Anchoring Bias: A seller may fixate on the first thing the buyer says and frame the rest of the conversation around it, even if it’s not the core issue.

  Result: the real problem stays hidden

• Status Quo Bias: A seller assumes the buyer probably won’t make a change, so they subconsciously avoid bold questioning or proposing challenging solutions.

  Result: the extent of the problem is never uncovered.

• Sunk Cost Fallacy: You stay committed to deals that are clearly going nowhere, simply because you’ve already invested a significant amount of time on it.

  Result: Inaccurate pipeline, unmet forecasts and missed targets.

• Regret Aversion: You fail to adequately highlight the risks of not changing, because you want to avoid being the one who ‘pushes’ the buyer too hard.

  Result: No urgency and slipped deals.

When bias takes over, sellers miss the problem that really matters. They diagnose too soon and pitch before the buyer feels the full weight of their problem. Or worse, they solve the wrong problem entirely.

Problem-centred selling demands a different approach.

With problem-centred selling you start with structure. Sellers ask buyer-led questions that test assumptions.

They must go slow to go fast. Most importantly, sellers focus on the buyer’s real problem, not their own assumptions.

Our approach challenges reps to:

• Step back from assumptions

  
  

• Ask questions that go deeper than surface-level symptoms

  
  

• Let the buyer’s language and priorities guide the conversation

When bias runs the show, sellers don’t just solve the wrong problem, they train buyers to distrust them. Why? Because buyers can sense when you’re listening to confirm, not to understand.

The most effective sellers are aware of their bias. They use objective checklists or tools to remove the bias in their pipeline.

Next time you or your team is prepping for a discovery call, ask them: Are you truly curious? Or just confirming what I hope to hear?

Because until we unlearn our own assumptions we will be doomed to never uncover the buyer’s truth.

Think of your last lost deal. Did bias play a role? Share if this resonates or comment with the bias you fight most often.

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