Anchoring, a cognitive bias, is the tendency of most humans to overly rely on a specific value and adjust further decisions in the direction of that value.

Wikipedia explains:

The anchoring and adjustment heuristic was first theorized by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In one of their first studies, the two showed that when asked to guess the percentage of African nations which are members of the United Nations, people who were first asked “Was it more or less than 45%?” guessed lower values than those who had been asked if it was more or less than 65%. The pattern has held in other experiments for a wide variety of different subjects of estimation. Others have suggested that anchoring and adjustment affects other kinds of estimates, like perceptions of fair prices and good deals.

Anchoring applies to shopping for small business financial services because, when you shop around, the provider you are shopping with often says: “well, that’s a pretty good deal, but we can do slightly better” and offer you a slightly better deal.  Your subconscious pressures you to accept their offer while their subconscious keeps them from offering a better deal, even if it means potentially losing your business.

Two good strategies for overcoming this cognitive bias are:

1. let the salespeople know that you are shopping broadly, understand your requirements and they won’t get a second chance to give a better offer – if possible avoid telling them what your current rates are – bluff if necessary.  This is basically the strategy that the government uses in auctioning off wireless spectrum, it is also the strategy that feefighters uses to our customers good deals on small business financial services

2. anchor the salesperson to a number more beneficial to you – take your first quote (the one slightly better than your current deal) and take it to another vendor, and then a third, play them off against each other until you can’t get them any lower – here is some data on how such a strategy works for credit card processing