Are your sales efforts trapped in an echo chamber?
It was Pluto who said “Yeah! Yeah!” enthusiastically to Mickey occasionally but it was Plato who said “birds of a feather stick together”. It is rumoured that this first occurred on an ornithology trip with an ancient Greek ancestor of Bill Odie - but whilst Williamos Odus had taken Plato literally and was pondering the existence of some kind of bizarre avian glue, Plato, inspired by the flocks of birds afore him, was actually highlighting the existence of homophily.
So what is homophily? Is it where the Fresh Prince was born and raised, playing basketball for a large portion of his week? Of course not, as the Fresh Prince was first screened in 1990, at least a decade after Plato’s death. #history Is it some kind of human soft cheese? Best not go there. So where the hell are we going with this?
To best explain, it is worth considering the “echo chamber”. A term that is often bandied around when there are discussions about both politics and social media - two dull and decisive topics. But what the active members of these communities both share are quite entrenched, often partisan viewpoints. Ask yourself this if you’re not sold - “when was the last time I convinced someone to change the way they vote”? Chances are you’ve probably never managed to convince someone to change the way they vote and even if you have you probably don’t know. So what tends to happen is that other than lobbyists and others employed by political parties for that very purpose, most of us don’t bother trying as it is easier and more productive to push water uphill with a fork.
Is more of the same always a good thing?
Similarly on social media Plato’s observation regarding metaphorical avian glue is ironically an ideal fit with how most people use the likes of Twitter. We tend to follow people with similar interests, we like and comment on trends that we enjoy being involved in and we stay broadly within our comfort zones. We don’t follow comedians who offend us, fashion brands whose style we’re not fond of, politicians we don’t vote for, teams we don’t support or people with polar opposite viewpoints or conflicting passions. So we remain “stuck together” in our echo chambers. One of us says “x” and the rest of the chamber reply “hell yeah” further entrenching us all. And this is homophily.
So let’s consider this in a work context and in keeping with my specialty, lets consider a hypothetical sales function. So the sales team of a manufacturing business could look like this: -
You’ll spot a few trends across this imaginary team already without me needing to point them out. And it is these trends that are often subconscious results of homophily at a recruitment or internal promotion phase. As with politics and social media and indeed memberships to clubs, we generally tend to surround ourselves with the same or very similar people. But in business this can be dangerous - in fact it can be a lot more dangerous than “rocking the boat” with a hire from left of field.
Of course, there are benefits from recruiting someone with specific knowledge of your industry, technologies or with very niche qualifications but in my experience, if the search terms are set too narrow, all that ends up happening is that you get more of the same. And more of the same means a lack of diversity. And a lack of diversity will mean that we miss opportunities that we don’t even know exist - and this ignorance and/or lack of willing to look beyond what we know and are comfortable with maintains our position in the comfort zone of homophily. It stifles creativity and ultimately strangles growth opportunities.
If you “bravely” hired this person as your next team member what might happen?
Perhaps Vanessa would be able to open up the Italian market for you? She might have an insight into why your current Italian distributor isn’t responding to your marketing team in the same way others are? She may have connections in Italy who can help you with a supply chain issue you have experienced? And Vanessa has no experience of your industry - but her knowledge of how things are done in her previous industries may be the most enlightening things that others have heard in decades as they have been in a bubble thinking their way was the only way. She may also be a psychopathic, kleptomaniac with horrendous body odour, no table manners, is awful at her job and has a tendency to sing to the office radio despite being tone deaf - but you can’t expect to get every recruit spot on.
One thing that some sales managers do is to invite the rest of the team into a stage of interviews when recruiting. This is no doubt done with the best intentions but if you think about it objectively there must be elements of the following that they bring into the room with them: -
Is this person going to be better than me?
Is this person going to beat me to a promotion?
Is this person going to upset the applecart in terms of the team dynamic?
Is this person like us?
Ideally the recruiting sales manager should want the answers to questions one, two and three to be “yes” as this means that they are excellent at what they do, are raising the bar and will add something different. But what about question 4? Now I’m not saying that the best teams are a complete mis-match as clearly there needs to be a good working relationship in a sales team to ensure healthy competition, cover for holidays and sickness and to help keep morale as high as possible. But equally you don’t want a team of clones.
Damon was struggling with the new sales manager’s “always be closing” bullshit but didn’t want to risk being remotely choked like Ian who’d only asked about the new commission scheme for next year in last month’s sales meeting.
I’m not offering any solutions here, I simply wanted to dip my toe into homophily when it comes to how you might view your sales function. Is everyone wearing the same shiny suits with pointy shoes? Is anyone standing out in the right way for being different? Are some of the team trying different things in different ways and getting different results?
If you’d like to do things a bit differently from a sales perspective I can train your team differently, mentor you or your team differently or sell for you differently. I’d love to hear from you.
