CSO Insights Blog Posts

Are Your Friends Making You Unsuccessful?

The cover story of the September 13^th New York Times Magazine asked a similarly provocative question: Are your friends making you fat? Or happy, or unhealthy, or whatever you're choosing to gauge. The detailed article chronicles the findings of Nicholas Cristakis and James Fowler from their new book, Connected. In short, their theory based on looking at health study records kept on 15,000 Framingham, MA, residents for more than fifty years is that social contagion affects each of us through our network of friends and associates.

Beyond simple peer pressure, the authors' most surprising suggestion is that we are effected by, and affect others one or two steps removed, which they called "three degrees of influence." There are academics and other researchers that question Cristakis and Fowler's findings and approach but my question is: Can social contagion impact your sales effectiveness? Before you scoff at this idea consider one other finding from their study and another from our Sales Performance Optimization (SPO) study. Take the 2010 SPO survey now!

The more people in an individual's network, the better off they seem to be. For example, happiness is more easily transferred and has a greater boost, than unhappiness and its accompanying downer.

Now, here's a statistic from our SPO survey that has been constant the past three years. We've been asking: What percentage of your total year's revenues last year was generated by the top 20% of your sales reps? The answer is not the Pareto's 80/20 rule but it's also not far off: 60%. That is, the top 20% of reps contribute 60% of total revenues (a 3X multiplier), while the other 80% of reps contribute 40% of revenues (a .5X multiplier). This means the top reps are six times more productive than the other reps.

Salespeople naturally connect with lots of folks. After all, it's their job. But in thinking about some of the most productive sales reps I've seen, there is a common profile. They are constantly networking, leveraging new social media applications and/or simply making sure they are not isolated. What's your experience? Think about the top reps in your company and among your own peers and friends. Are the most successful also successful networkers? My answer keeps coming up "yes!"

A topic that has been filling webinars, newsletters, conferences and other discussion is how and whether companies can monetize social media. Sure Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and all the rest are interesting but can they be leveraged to help companies sell more? To market more efficiently and, as a result, make more money?

While the marketing and media gurus debate these questions maybe you should take a look at your own network (and net worth) and evaluate whether you have an active game plan in place to grow your number of contacts-and to touch them on a regular basis. If Cristakis and Fowler are right, simply expanding your network will improve your happiness-and if doing so brings you into the top 20% of reps I'm betting you'll be smiling a lot more, too.

Sell well,

Barry Trailer

< Back