The one constant – the one stable and consistent aspect of sales negotiations – is that all sales are won and lost on illusions. Each business partner competes primarily based on what they believe about a situation. Let's be honest. Anyone's interpretation of any situation reflects a large portion of wishful thinking and illusions. Think back again to Mr. Anderson's debrief in the introduction. He went into that negotiation believing a certain set of things to be true, but his interpretation clashed with what the buyer, Aurelio, was really thinking.

Without a keen level of situational awareness and System 1 training, salespeople's reading and interpretation of a negotiating context risks being distorted by two dangerous illusions: stability and success.

The stability illusion: When the path to dinner leads to death

Cavepeople learned to follow the tracks of certain animals, because their experience and their inherited oral history kept things simple: some paths led to dinner, while other paths led to death. Their survival depended on knowing the difference.

Their twenty-first-century counterparts on sales teams view their jobs the same way. They develop strategies and sets of behaviours that they can apply over and over in the name of efficiency. But this sense of stability – and the reasoning behind it – is an illusion, especially in a business world undergoing significant transformation. The greater the degree of transformation in an industry, the more dangerous the illusion. This is how System 1 can trap a salesperson.

Salespeople who labour under the stability illusion like to think that their own business environment remains more or less stable from year to year, and that their customer's behaviour doesn't change in any meaningful way. They draw a correlation between stability and success, particularly for long-term buyer–seller relationships. But that correlation is only an artifact of their memory.

The stability illusion shows up in the expected responses to certain patterns. If salespeople say ‘X’ to the customer, they anticipate a certain response, and conversely, when the customer says ‘Y’ the salespeople tend to have a standard, almost automatic response at hand based on prior experiences and activated by System 1. Conventional sales training reinforces this behaviour by investing a considerable amount of time in sales manuals with detailed instructions that cover everything from opening a sales call to closing the deal.

Undoubtedly, learning these kinds of responses can be very helpful for salespeople in training. The responses provide them with an initial basis to programme their System 1. Having that solid initial knowledge base can alleviate their anxiety and fear. For them, this sense of stability is certainly comforting and desirable. But over time, they need to be careful that this initial knowledge base does not become their only knowledge base, a trap that treats apparent cause-and-effect connections as absolute givens. The dangers arise when these responses assume a fixed reality taken at face value and the salesperson stops trying to figure out what is going on under the surface. When savvy purchasers meet salespeople with well-defined routine behaviours, they will use these rigid routines against them, because they can predict the responses that certain statements will trigger.

In Situation 2.1 we look at a common situation that illustrates how strong and pervasive the stability illusion is.

Before you continue, take a brief timeout to think back to your own initiation into a company or your first conversations with a mentor. How much of their advice came with sentences like Bob's? How many times did you wonder about the advice, even if you didn't challenge it?

The success illusion: Whose game did you actually win?

Salespeople are also susceptible to the success illusion, which System 1 will reinforce if they aren't careful. How can success be an illusion? After all, the whole point of the negotiation is to win the deal on the best possible terms, right?

The success illusion occurs when salespeople feel convinced that they have achieved the best possible outcome, but in reality they did extremely well within a negotiation frame established by their opponent. Winning on the purchaser's terms is one of the big drivers behind the success illusion. In some situations, the salesperson has made a concession or a compromise to achieve success in the negotiation, but the concession or compromise was either too large or was unnecessary. The reality framed for the negotiation could have and should have been different, especially when that reality was determined by the purchaser or by the legacy of past negotiations.

The worst-case scenario is falling prey to both the stability illusion and the success illusion at the same time in the same negotiation. You walk in thinking it's the ‘same old same old’. You're taking what you hear from the procurement person at face value and you're taking the numbers that they provide you with as givens. Then after the close, you walk out thinking you did the best you could under the circumstances. But who says those circumstances were the best for you in the first place? As harsh as it may sound, the perception of success was all in your head. The outcome could have been much better.

We safely assume – based on our own experiences and all the stories we have heard over the years – that every salesperson has fallen victim to at least one of these two illusions. To be more precise, it means that at one time or another, all salespeople have acted in accordance with their own intuitive hunches, impulses, and ingrained behaviours, but did so with an under-informed autopilot that hampered their situational awareness. Their autopilot may have had extensive knowledge and experience in a few narrowly defined areas, but it lacked the breadth necessary to recognize and process other patterns or events.

As we will show in the Chapters 3 and 4, the important step for salespeople is not to avoid these illusions and their potentially harmful effects. The important step is to learn to control the illusions themselves by managing the impressions they send and interpreting the ones received more critically.