Sales people, like many folks, rely heavily on the combination of their intellect, experience, analysis, and intuition to make decisions and advance sales. The karmic sales person is no different, except for the requirement of a level of self awareness. When you lose a deal, it is natural to blame the prospect, process, or some external variable. But are you lying to yourself? More often than not you will find that the reason the deal didn't happen, was not due to some failure in the external environment, but one within your internal one.

This does not mean second guess your strategies and decisions. It means that the karmic sales person needs to take the time to safeguard his/her decision making against falling victim to the failures of the intellect. What are these? Well there are many but a few key ones are as follows:

Over confidence
This is the classic failure where the salesperson in having closed many deals, believes they are infallible and as such can close any deal in any circumstance. How do you know when you are falling victim to this fallacy:
-You bypass key elements of your process because "you already know" what the customer is going to say.
-You ignore listening to or addressing minor objections because your believe you can deal with them later
-You ignore key pieces of data that would lead you to believe this deal isn't going to work because you feel you can overcome them
on force of personality

Sunk cost effect
This is when you have invested a large amount of time and resources into a deal, and feel the need to invest more to justify the initial investment. This is often exhibited in a late stage deal that may have stalled for any number of reasons. Sales people often spend an inordinate amount of time following up, building business cases, etc to try to get the customer to move forward.

Recency Effect
The view that the most recent experience in your sales career is representative of past events and a valid predictor of future events. A great example of this is when a rep closes a big deal without following a process, gets on a hot streak and decides that he doesn't need to prospect anymore, etc. The recent experience overwhelms the mountain of data that went before it and leads the sales person to believe that what is happening now is the new reality. When in fact it is perhaps just a blip on the radar.

Confirmation effect
This is when reps seek out information that confirms their initial impression of the value of an opportunity. I cant count the number of times a rep has gotten off of a call and told me this is going to be a huge deal and its a lock. In my opinion that view can cause many more problems later on for the rep and the customer. It is critically important not to form an opinion about an opportunity until you really understand what is going on. The confirmation effect is that the rep will seek out data that verifies this initial opinion often discounting or disregarding data that is contradictory.

There are many more of these effects where your brain will lead you astray. The goal is not to eliminate these effects, but as a karmic sales person to mitigate them in order to more effectively support your customers and your own success.

Moment of Zen
“The mind acts like an enemy for those who do not control it.”- Bhagavad Gita