Buyer feedback · 4 min read

Sales blindness. The problem your team can’t see.

The more your team knows about your product, the less clearly they can hear how it sounds to a buyer. Why it happens, and why the cure has to come from outside.

Think back to your first week in a new job. Half of what you heard in meetings went straight over your head. The acronyms flew past you. You nodded along and hoped nobody would ask you a question.

That confusion was uncomfortable. It was also valuable. For a few short weeks, you saw your company exactly as your buyers see it.

Then you learned the language. The acronyms became shorthand. The product made sense. And the ability to see it through a buyer’s eyes quietly disappeared.

We call this sales blindness.

Knowledge changes how you see.

Psychologists have a name for the mechanism behind it. They call it the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it becomes very hard to imagine not knowing it. Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber coined the term in 1989. Researchers have since found it across business, education, law and medicine.

Two things drive it. First, you struggle to set aside what you know when you picture someone who doesn’t. Second, familiar information feels easy, so you assume it is easy for everyone else too. The term your team uses twenty times a day feels obvious. To your buyer, it is noise.

The buyer knows they are confused. You don’t know you are confusing them.

The bias only runs one way

What jargon does to a buyer.

This is not a question of style. It affects whether people buy.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour found that technical language lowered people’s willingness to buy, because it made the message harder to process. The same research points to earlier work showing that people who use complex, specialised language are seen as less trustworthy.

Other research found that adding definitions did not fix the problem. The jargon still made the message harder to take in.

So the buyer sits in your meeting feeling slow, confused and a little embarrassed. They rarely say so. They just go quiet, and then they go elsewhere.

Why you can’t fix it from the inside.

The obvious answer is to tell your team to watch their language. It won’t work.

The curse of knowledge has been shown to persist even after people are warned about it and offered money to avoid it. Knowing the bias exists does not switch it off.

Expertise makes it worse, not better. Fisher and Keil (2015) found that people become more confident in their ability to explain topics in their own field of study, and that this confidence often isn’t earned. The more you know, the more sure you are that you are being clear.

And self-assessment tells you very little. In one B2B study of salespeople selling technical products, the customer’s view was a far better guide to satisfaction than the salesperson’s own.

Your team is not careless. They are simply unable to see themselves through the buyer’s eyes. Nobody can.

You need the buyer’s view, on repeat.

If sales blindness comes from the inside, the cure has to come from the outside. From the buyer.

That means asking buyers, regularly, how your sales conversations actually felt. Were they clear? Did they feel understood? Did anything leave them lost?

Two things make this work.

The takeaway

The buyer can always see it.

Your newest starter can still spot the jargon this week. By next quarter, they won’t.

Your buyer always will. The only question is whether you’re asking them.

Want to hear how your sales conversations really land? We ask your buyers, independently, and bring back what they tell us.