Sales Leadership Blog (salesleadershipblog.eu)
2 artikelen in categorie Curiosity Gene gevonden:
The Rotterdam Sales Leadership Study: The discovery of the Curiosity Gene
Can information about a sales professional’s DNA predict how sales professionals actually interact with customers? Why should we use genetics to study sales professionals? Let me answer these questions with some facts.
For a few years already we - Wouter van den Berg, Loek Worm, Rick Bagozzi and Wim Rietdijk - are studying the behavior of sales professionals using genetic markers. We have come to call this study “The Rotterdam Sales Leadership Study.” In this study sales professionals provide their profile and their DNA by donating saliva. This is then send to a research lab in the Netherlands. The participating sales professionals receive a personal feedback rapport that explains their DNA score on a specific set of genes. Let’s call this the intimate part of our study. Sales professionals who participate in our study like to have their DNA tested because it provides them with information about their temperament, which is innate. The participating sales professionals learn what building stones their character is made off, the building stones from which they (we) as humans build their (our) “character”. The rapport gives an insight in the character of the person as it is at one particular moment but which people (we) shape over time.
An important distinction: some sales professionals talk and other listen?
Some years ago already, my former professor Bart Weitz (then at Wharton School now at the University of Florida), made a crucial distinction between sales professionals who just talk when they meet customers and those who engage in conversations with customers. He called it the “selling orientation” versus the “customer orientation”. When selling orientated sales professionals meet a customer, they seem to perceive the customer as someone “to be manipulated” (almost as an object) and as someone to whom one should sell something no matter whether the product fits their needs or not. The second group of sales professionals interact in a different way: these people actually passionately seek to understand the needs of the customer, they ask deep questions and try to match the needs that are revealed during the conversation with their products portfolio.
Is that an important distinction? Sales professionals who talk a lot in the end might manipulate customers who succumb to the professionals’ sales pressure. These sales professionals might generate more sales in the short term but over time customers do not like to meet these sales professionals as they feel uncomfortable with them. Sales professionals who are interested in the customer (those with the customer orientation) are liked more by their customers hence customers develop long-term relationships with the sales professional and of course the professional develops a relationship with them. Needless to say such a distinction matters (a lot).
Asking a fundamental question: a biological explanation why sales professionals have a selling versus customer orientation?
We sought to provide different explanations for these two different sales orientations. First, we must realize that many researchers propose that sales professionals who display a customer orientation have an intrinsic motivation or like to develop long-term relationships. But such explanations are tautological; in other terms, wanting to develop a long-term relationship never can be an explanation for a long-term relationship that develops from customer orientation (which is an outcome). What if this selling versus customer orientation is a reflection of something more fundamental, namely something biological?
We studied sales professionals with a customer orientation using more fundamental biological explanations. To our amazement, these sales professionals were more likely to be passionate about the products they were selling and they were constantly on the look out for problems which customers have (or could have) and which their products could help them solve these problems – hence their products are solutions. In addition, customers felt excitement when they talked with them during sales conversation as they felt that they were being understood by the sales professional. In the end we concluded that these sales professionals are very curious people. People who are constantly looking for new nuances and constantly want to learn from what they see and hear, feel a great amount of satisfaction. In a business context this learning from customers in order to propose a solution is called “opportunity recognition”.
Why do customer orientated sales professionals get excited about finding or recognizing opportunities? There is a biological explanation to it! We know from Neuroscience that when people learn they produce dopamine within their dopamine system within the brain. More concretely, neurons in the dopamine system produce dopamine which is absorbed by another neuron via the dopamine receptors which in turn trigger a chain of reactions such as learning and excitement that comes with learning. Sorry, that is how the brain works, it is a biological fact. Now a bit more difficult, our brain consists of different types of the dopamine receptors, there are type 1 and type 2 receptors. These types of receptors (their interaction) in turn affect how the brain learns and how it is being regulated.
The receptors are produced by people’s genes but depending on one’s DNA some people produce more or less of these receptors. We did focus on two genes namely the dopamine 2 and 4 gene (known as type 2 dopamine receptors) because the first is known to have a variant that is associated with a lower flexibility during learning (almost repetitive behavior) and the second has a variant that is associated with a tendency to explore new ideas and environments. Guess what we discovered? Sales professionals with a variant of the dopamine 2 receptor tended to have a selling orientation (hence they are repetitive), whereas the sales professional who carried a variant of the dopamine 4 receptor tended to have a customer orientation (hence they are natural explorers).
What does that imply? Sales professionals who are customer oriented tend to be more curious; apparently this tendency seems to be innate. What is an implication of this finding? Remember the distinction between temperament and character: sales professionals who are customer oriented have learned by sales training and experiences to dig deeper in the customer’s needs (character), however, their temperament urges them to keep digging deeper and create more nuances. So how should managers interact with these sales professionals? Better have a sales manager who is also curious because soon or later the sales professional knows more about the market than the sales manager and the sales manager will be unable to have a good conversation with the sales professional.
What about the sales professional with a selling orientation? These are sales professionals who do not easily switch their behavior; probably they might want to switch their sales orientation but they cannot do so. So there is a deeper reason why customers do not like them: these customers unconsciously notice that they behave like an addicted sales professional! In the end they become a night mare for many customers.
Professor Willem Verbeke
Erasmus School of Economics, Rotterdam
Onderwerpen: Artikelen, Curiosity Gene, customer orientation, DNA, Experiment, Klantcontact, Loek Worm, Professor Willem Verbeke Erasmus School of Economics, Rick Bagozzi and Wim Rietdijk, Rotterdam, sales professionals, saliva, selling orientation, verkopen, Wouter van den Berg.
Are salespeople happy losers? No the picture is more complicated!
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.
Onderwerpen: BrainBoost Verkooptactiek, coachen, Curiosity Gene, DNA, Professor Willem Verbeke Erasmus School of Economics.