Are Your Salespeople (and Your Senior Executives) Seeing the World as it REALLY IS?
As a salesperson and a sales manager I loved it when I could get a glimpse of how the senior executives of my company thought.
Sometimes, I was shocked to learn they were seeing the world as it really wasn’t.
Other times I was chagrined to learn I was the one perceiving things incorrectly.
Are your customer-facing people and your senior executives seeing the world as it really is? Or is their world hampered by some kind of bubble, like the security detail around the presidents of the US.
If there is a disconnect between what salespeople and their management sees, is this discrepancy ever even recognized?
Daniel Simons, the co-author of “The Invisible Gorilla” created a wonderful TED video: “Seeing the World as it Isn’t”, that has a great deal to say about how we manage our companies and our sales and marketing:
Whether you are a wrong-headed salesperson, or CEO, everybody is entitled to mistakes now and then. However, when you are a CEO, these mistakes can have a lot more impact: multi-million dollar product launches that flop, disastrous distribution policies or reorganization schemes, and worse.
Note how Simons makes the point that although our senses seem to be deceiving us, it is a more savvy application of our senses that tells us what is really going on. Evidence rules – if we follow the rules of evidence, which are the means by which we identify reality.
At 5:10, he begins making critical observations that tie to managing sales and marketing in our companies:
- (Due to unchallenged perceptual appearances like these …) we assume that everyone sees the world exactly as it is.
- (Despite differences in knowledge, beliefs, and expectations …) we feel like we are seeing the world in the same way as everybody else.
- This applies not just to our visual perceptions, but also to the way we think, remember, and reason about things. For example, we think we see more detail than we do around us, we think we remember more than we really do, and that we know more than we really do.
- These illusions lead us to think everyone is seeing the same thing we are, when they may not be seeing things the same way at all.
- Any time you are trying to be a trainer or a CEO or trying to influence others in any manner, you have to take in to account that your knowledge, experiences, and what you see are going to be different than those of your audience.
- All of advertising (not to mention all of marketing and selling!) depends on your ability to know exactly what your audience will see in your communications to them.
At 6:37, he makes a brilliant observation:
“Even though we all see the world differently, we all share the illusion that we see the world the same as everybody else. And only by testing your knowledge, by testing what you are seeing, just like you do with a visual illusion, can you realize that you are not actually seeing the world as everybody else is. Only by testing can you see the world as it actually is.”
We all need to improve our methods of perceiving and checking our understanding. Businesses, especially, need this to prevent multi-million dollar product launches that flop, disastrous distribution policies or reorganization schemes, and worse: salespeople who do not know what they are doing!
Fortunately, that method is becoming better understood every day: it is iterative testing (which is a core principle of process improvement). Yup, good old PDCA.
