Seller psychology: How easy familiarity can impede account development

Joy has been selling office equipment to a national manufacturing company for years. She has a great relationship with Carlo, the regional purchasing manager, often sharing jokes and updates on each other’s families.

One day, Joy’s sales manager tells her they need to expand this account to make up for a slowdown in new business. Joy agrees. She’s currently supplying the eastern region through Carlo and believes she’ll be able to find easy wins with the western and central regions.

But after discovery calls with those purchasing managers, she doesn’t feel as confident. “I thought their needs would be similar to Carlo’s, but I’ll have to re-spec every piece of equipment to make this work,” she thinks to herself. “And these guys aren’t as nice as Carlo. It wasn’t even fun talking to them.”

Urgency vs. importance

As Joy ponders the mountain of work she’ll need to do with these new contacts, she gets a call from Carlo. “I need you here to train some new staff on your latest equipment,” he says. “It’s kind of urgent.”

“Figuring out new proposals will be a huge project,” she thinks, “I’ll take care of Carlo first, then get back to the new regions. They didn’t express any urgency, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

But weeks go by, and she never gets back to account expansion.

Hearing this, Joy’s boss moves her off the account. Joy is disappointed and later embarrassed when she learns that Kai, who replaced her, sold to both the western and central locations, while still supporting Carlo.

Joy knew cracking the new regions had the potential to triple her revenue, but she prioritized management of her familiar account. Why?

A treacherous shortcut

According to cognitive researchers, there is good reason for this. When we encounter something repeatedly, the brain creates shortcuts, so we don’t have to process that experience from scratch every time. We gain what researchers call “perceptual fluency” with each exposure. As a result, when faced with the choice between the familiar and unfamiliar, we unconsciously favor the familiar because it requires less mental energy.

This is critical for day-to-day functioning, but it has a side effect. It becomes harder for us to conduct an accurate cost-benefit analysis when comparing familiar with unfamiliar. This is exactly what happened when Joy prioritized Carlo’s training request over account expansion.

She chose the familiar option without consciously meaning to. She perceived dealing with new buying centers as more difficult than it was because she was comparing it to the ease she felt with her existing one.

This also explains why Kai fared better. He was new to the account, so all the buying centers were unfamiliar to him. He didn’t have an easier path to tempt him.

How to cope

The good news is that with awareness of this cognitive bias holding us back, we can get ahead of it, and even use it to our advantage. Here are three steps you can take:

1. Be intentionally curious about new opportunities within your accounts. Research suggests deliberately seeking out unfamiliar experiences can protect you against the negative side effects of perceptual fluency.
2. Don’t overestimate the effort of expansion. Knowing that your brain is working against you can help you conduct a more accurate cost-benefit analysis and persist with unfamiliar opportunities, even when they feel difficult.
3. Consider including your existing contact in meetings with new ones. This way, the comfort you feel with the person you know can carry over into interactions with new people.

This blog entry is adapted from the BTS Total Access micro video “Account Development: How Familiarity Holds Sellers Back.” If you’re a Total Access customer, you can watch the video here. If you’re not, but would like to see this video (or any of our other programs), request a demo and we’ll get you access.

The blog post and BTS Total Access micro video are based in part on the following academic study: Pilat D., & Sekoul D. (2021). Mere Exposure Effect. The Decision Lab. Retrieved May 23, 2024, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/mere-exposure-effect.