I believe today’s customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making any decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and salespeople, but in reality, it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer’s decision process. Every aspect of your business must be about sales.

Dartmouth College’s Nailya Ordabayeva and two colleagues—Lisa Cavanaugh and Darren Dahl of the University of British Columbia—showed 300 NFL fans a description of a league-branded hoodie and either a one-star or a five-star review of it by a Cleveland Browns fan. The participants answered questions about their similarity to the reviewer and their interest in buying the garment.

Though they’ve been warned for decades about the dangers of over-relying on gut instinct and personal experience, managers keep failing to critically examine—much less challenge—the ideas their decisions are based on. To correct this problem they need to think and act like scientists. That requires doing five things: (1) being a knowledgeable skeptic and relentlessly questioning assumptions; (2) investigating anomalies—things that are unexpected or don’t look right; (3) devising testable hypotheses that can be quantifiably confirmed or disproved; (4) running experiments that produce hard evidence; and (5) probing cause and effect.