Ghosts in the Machine: Overcoming Decision-Making Bias in the Sales Cycle with Behavioral Science

Sales is hard. Fortunately, there is something you can do to make it easier: accept, understand, and embrace human irrationality.

Pretty much every part of the sales process-from prospecting all the way through closing-has been thoroughly dissected in countless books and training programs. Every part, that is, except the impact of human irrationality on all of it. Appreciating irrationality in decision-making throughout the sales cycle remains a blind spot for most salespeople. It also represents a huge opportunity.

By leveraging insights from behavioral science, Ghosts in the Machine unpacks the common challenges salespeople encounter at each phase in the sales cycle. Instead of promising secrets and shortcuts for success, this book will help you understand the behavioral drivers behind the challenges you face and why they persist. Value that comes from secrets and shortcuts is fleeting; value that comes from understanding why has staying power.

If you came here to discover the secrets or shortcuts to being a successful salesperson you have come to the wrong place. This is not that kinda book. This is a why book.

In these pages you will discover why...

• Salespeople make prospecting harder than it already is
• Professional relationships are not built rationally
• People are too afraid and too distracted to think about changing
• Negotiating is not the game you think it is
• Salespeople are meant to be heroes

Ghosts in the Machine is not an attempt to recreate the sales wheel. The guidance provided in these pages will work alongside your preferred go-to-market sales methodology, whatever it may be. By applying behavioral science concepts and principles to the sales cycle in a systematic and holistic way, author Ryan Voeltz gives you a better understanding of the human beings you are communicating with and the hidden drivers behind the sometimes irrational decisions they make, decreasing their resistance to you and increasing your effectiveness selling to them.