Clotaire Rapaille argued in Harvard Business Review that salespeople like to hunt (and work) for a deal but the deal itself (or the catch) is not that crucial. He compares it with fox hunting: there is a lot of excitement during the hunt but in the end most fox hunting endeavors end up without that a fox has been shot. This description is a bit negative: first this observation does not only apply to salespeople but to human nature as a whole – in other words we are more excited from the striving towards a goal than reaching the goal. Second, salespeople actually celebrate a deal. Their income depends on it. But still there is a basic question:

What actually makes people seek to hunt?

Recently, we did research on genetics, especially the DRD4 and the DRD2 – these two genes produce receptors for dopamine within the dopamine system within our brain, which is quite complex! Salespeople with a specific variation of the DRD4 gene actually displayed more hunting behavior. However, we tried to make some nuanced remarks concerning “hunting behaviors”.  We found that salespeople who carried this gene actually displayed customer oriented behavior, which we do not so much conceive as hunting but more as the ability to keep learning from customers during conversations with customers and finding enjoyment in learning from customers. In addition these salespeople like to make money but they do so by better understanding customers – they like to get at their implicit needs. So I feel that Rapaille his statement is a bit rude.

Salespeople with a specific variant of the DRD2 actually tend to talk more to the customer and just sell without taking any interest in what salespeople need.

I am especially doing research on why this one gene (the DRD4 or DRD2) has such a big effect on people’s lives - or should we say here - on their sales orientation in case we talk about sales? Now remember, we have about 25.000 genes of which 80% are expressed in the brain! It is one thing to find an association; it is another thing to understand the association. So I focus now on understanding how genes affect our life – such as cognitive life etc.

What I learned this summer is that by thinking about one gene and its association with a phenotype (a behavior that is associated with a gene), we are forced to think deeper into how our brain works. It got me to step back from neuro-economics where we read about the dopamine pathway in the brain, while there are many dopamine pathways and many different dopamine receptors (actually, there are 5 kinds of dopamine receptors).

More concretely, as I focus on the DRD2 gene and reading about it, we can now better understand that dopamine is not only involved in reward learning but also in higher order learning: dopamine plays a role for instance when people have to switch cognitive tasks or when people have to switch in tasks as the reward for the task changes. Having specific mutation in DRD2 come with a higher performance on one task but with a lower performance on another task.  This micro view on people via genetics actually forces me to step down at times from what I learned and allows me to get new ideas.  Such steps in the long term allow me to think better what salespeople actually do when they work with customers.  To come back to Rapaille, I feel that his analogue on fox hunting is too bold to talk about sales, as we know more about genetics we will be able to better understand what some salespeople do and others cannot do.

So if I can do this every year, step back, let go and then go back to trying to understand sales, I can better teach and talk with our coaches about what is the essence of sales. These conversations provide them with insights to train salespeople. It is a nice summer indeed.