Are you an ideal salesperson? Do you possess the right habits and personality traits? Before you critique yourself, consider you may be battling an unseen enemy- representativeness.
Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
You’ve just learned your getting a new next-door neighbor. All you know is she will be one of two salespeople. Salesperson A drives a BMW. Salesperson B drives a BMW, has a confident personality, and travels extensively for work. Who is more likely to be your new neighbor, person A or person B? If you chose person B you would be… (drum roll please) wrong!
How is this possible? By definition, people like Salesperson B are a subset of people like Salesperson A. Therefore, the group of people who comprise all BMW-driving salespeople has to be bigger than those with the same car who are also self-assured road warriors. This means the likelihood of your neighbor being Salesperson A is higher. The reason it’s so easy to chose Salesperson B is because, in our minds, the extra details provided make them more representative of a typical sales rep.
According to Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, representativeness is a mental shortcut. We use it to judge probability by looking for patterns. As a result, it’s easier to believe the validity of comparisons between reps when one meets our stereotype of the ideal rep and the other doesn’t.
In real life, high performing salespeople are a topic of great interest. Leaders, often set out to find what makes these overachievers unique. In doing so they often mistakenly settle on the traits they expected them already to have. And, rarely do they look any further. Rushing to judgement, leaders may neglect factors, like the local economic climate, that can have a strong influence on sales.
As we know, the comparing of salespeople is serious business. For reps themselves, it can determine not only their income but their overall job security. Given the stakes, sales reps and leaders both need to slow their thinking and look deeper into the validity of their measurements. It’s time to value representatives over mere representativeness.
Meaning2work.com