- October 25, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I love it when readers forward article links to me, hoping that I will debunk the article in a Blog post. That’s what happened when Mike Shannon sent me the link to a recent Success Magazine article entitled, “Born to Sell? The Science Behind Adaptive Learning and What it Means for Entrepreneurs.”
That is a revised title as the <title> in the HTML code revealed that the original title was, “What the Science of Sales Means for Entrepreneurs.” I knew this was going to be a page of crap when they managed to retain “science,” in the title, but replaced “sales” with “adaptive learning.” The article was supposed to be about being born to sell!
In 2011 I wrote an article that actually used science to answer the question of whether salespeople are born or made to sell. The only science in this Success Magazine article comes from one of two studies the article references but the article itself doesn’t have any of sales or science in it.
Let’s begin with the parameters of their “study.” The word “study” is in quotes because the sample size consisted of a whopping 117 telemarketers in Asia, where sales best practices are decades behind where they are in the US, Canada and some of Europe. To make matters worse (for me), telemarketers are script readers, not salespeople. The author said they were providing a correlation between sales and genetic DNA. Their title said it was about Entrepreneurs, and within the article they said the connection was between DNA and Marketing. It seemed that everything in the article was disconnected. It was so poorly edited!
Back to the content. They measured things like revenue, spotting opportunities, and effort, none of which are actually sales core competencies. The strangest part is that they compared those “metrics” to genetics to show that when it came to predicting sales success, genetic traits outweigh personality traits. How in the world did they uncover genetic traits? Oh, that’s right, they didn’t.
They used personality traits as their control despite the lack of correlation between personality traits and sales success. This article is a fantastic example of how personality traits don’t measure anything having to do with sales.
One CEO cited in the article concluded that Adaptive Learning is the genetic DNA trait that differentiates successful people from the rest. So it wasn’t even about sales or marketing metrics, the article is pushing adaptive learning.
They identified five areas where those with genetic traits outperform others. They claim that those are:
- Tailor Your Approach
- Conduct a Sales Debrief
- Refine Your Skills Through Practice and Experimentation
- Use Data Analytics to Inform Your Decision Making
- Invest in Ongoing Training and Mentorship
Other than number 2 (of course we’re singling out #2 in an article that’s full of crap!), the other four are not sales or marketing specific but are simply common-sense goals for anyone interested in self-improvement.
The author introduced a study by Quotapath on “Solving the Biggest Sales Compensation Problems.” It concluded that 80% of reps are not hitting quota and 78% of revenue leaders said that 80% of their reps found it difficult to understand their comp plans, taking 3-6 months to fully grasp them. This suggests that the 450 companies surveyed are all large to enterprise sized companies. How do I know? They’re the biggest creators/offenders of crappy, poorly designed, over-complicated compensation plans. For example, check out this compensation plan I wrote about a few years ago.
#2 refers to a debrief, or sales coaching which, in this case, is on a specific customer interaction or tactic from yesterday or today. The study suggested that sales coaching can be used to compensate for those poorly constructed sales compensation plans.
Not only are crappy comp plans and sales coaching unrelated, they are not sales competencies, and they are not genetic.
In summary, this article was nothing more than a few bad ideas strung together. They introduced two studies – one on comp plans and one on telemarketers – and hoped the two studies would give the theories, that had so little to do with selling, credibility.
They failed.
Shame on Success Magazine for publishing such crap.
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