Every week he would hop in his car to drive into another state, missing prime selling hours, just to have a 30-minute meeting with another revised proposal.
After the third time promising to close this deal the sales manager said, “Why do you keep pursuing this?”
He responded, “I’ve spent so much time with senegal telegram data this deal there’s no way I won’t close it.”
The sales manager knew the sales rep really meant that he spent so much effort and time that he couldn’t let the deal go. Letting go would have meant the several months leading up to that point would have been a waste.
Imagine you buy a stock in a company because you read a cool story in the newspaper. Excited about the company you spend months researching the company and decide that you really love their vision.
Suddenly, a story breaks that the company’s CEO is leaving and there will be a change in management. The stock plummets and instead of selling off your shares while the losses are small you hold onto them because you don’t want all the research you did to go to waste.
Think about that. The research has already been done. The time has already been spent. You will never get that back.
Instead of cutting your losses, you held on to try and not waste the time that is already gone. This is known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy.