Greed and Confidence: how much do you need?
How you are oriented around these attributes will determine what you do.
How much Greed and Confidence do you need to succeed in sales? How much do you have, right now? And what happens when you have different levels of confidence and greed? God knows over the course my own career, I embodied all combinations of confidence and greed. In the best consulting tradition, above is a 2 by 2 matrix with Confidence and Greed. Let’s talk broadly about each of these four quadrants. Then I’d like you to consider which quadrant you are in right now and which you would prefer to be in.
Chickensh*t
Hungry & Scared
Philanthropist
Mercenary
Chickensh*t
Once I heard a manager raging loudly to a rep about his awful deals. Unfortunately, we all could hear him berate that poor salesperson.
“Your deals are so small, so bad, and so pathetic, they aren’t even chickensh*t”
Overhearing this on the floor, we all looked at each other. Um, yep, that was about right. The sales rep had very low confidence and also not much motivation. So he would basically put crazy tiny deals together with tons of discounting just to say that he closed something. The more you looked at his pipeline, the more depressing it became.
It always surprised me how long some Chickensh*t reps managed to stay, usually through creating tons of opportunities in the opportunity management system. This lethal combination of low greed and low confidence is basically the poster child for the kind of person the sales organization needs to move up in performance quickly or out of the sales organization at the earliest opportunity.
Hungry & Afraid
Hungry & Afraid is the core quadrant of most sales organizations. People with high orientation toward financial gain, and low to moderate confidence. Their drive and hunger make sales managers hire them and they often are hungry enough to overcome the fear of making some type of “ask” of the customer, so they often do pretty well with closing small to moderate size deals. However, they’re not confident enough to make a “big ask” and they’ll usually buckle under pressure, folding too soon on pricing or terms to get a bigger deal done. But there are loads of these people in the field and because of that they are the bread and butter of sales organizations.
The best Hungry & Afraid will deliver a constant flow of small/midsize low-risk deals that add up to great performance. Because of their fear orientation, they are often managed in ways to use that fear to make them work harder - publicly comparing KPI ratings in stack rankings, top and bottom performer lists, and frequent, visible purges of the bottom performers.
Because of their low to moderate confidence, the Hungry & Afraid will tend to shy away from really large deals, preferring, instead, the less anxiety-producing and higher-success potential of smaller and mid-size opportunities.
If you are Hungry & Afraid, you’ll want to continue to build your confidence. It will allow you to make bigger asks and potentially get better returns on your time.
Philanthropic
Give it all away!
If you are high in confidence and low in greed, you may at your best in Philanthropic organizations. The Philanthropic focus on
Missions and goals that are not profit-oriented
With low greed, there is desire to do the most possible, often for the least
A value-based focus that drives decisions (where the values are not money)
There are many great places and roles for a Philanthropic to work, but usually sales organizations and sales roles are not those places.
One of the greatest mis-matches that can occur is when a sales representative is in a for-profit organization but he or a key member of his team has a philanthropic orientation. The organization measures success based upon sales, but that Philanthropic person insists upon giving away the product because he so believes in the mission of the customer. When that happens, the sales person will be working for no quota credit while sucking up a huge portion of his time.
Once I worked for a young company that was struggling to get enough paying customers — we were working to demonstrate success to investors who would then provide our next funding stage. I’d been working to serve a non-profit organization for months in trial and proof of concept stages. I had sold them on the substantial value of our solution. The non-profit customer saw how using our product would allow it to serve more of its constituents at lower cost and because of this was willing to pay our significant price. As we worked to specify the ultimate, paid solution, I brought in a Sales Engineer to assist in engineering all the details. In our initial discussion, our Engineer became excited — captivated really — by the customer’s mission. He loved that the customer was serving people in need. I learned then that the Engineer was Philanthropic when he made a recommendation directly to the customer in this meeting that we should really be giving our solution to them at no cost. In fact, after the meeting, the engineer went to our CEO (demonstrating his High Confidence) to go to the mat for giving our services free to the customer (Low Greed), which after constant badgering by the engineer and by the customer, the CEO ultimately agreed to do. That cost me — and the company — all the revenue on this time consuming opportunity and ultimately, destroyed my ability to deliver quota that quarter.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with Philanthropic people and organizations. Nor is there a problem with profit seeking organizations being selectively philanthropic. A problem occurs, though, when your organization is primarily aligned for sales achievement (greed) but the sales rep is primarily aligned with non-monetary values.
Mercenary
“He is such a Mercenary” Naman stated.
Over an expansive selection of single malt whiskeys, my friend Naman Pham and I were philosophizing about the pros and cons of hyper-confident and uber-hungry salespeople. Mercenaries. We talked of some he had known: relentless in going for enormous deals with low chances of big payoff. These very high risk deals were all crafted to
exceed that rep’s yearly sales quota in one stroke, assuring the rapt attention of every sales manager all the way up to the CEO
set a new bar for low price per unit sold to customers
vastly shortchange or even prevent any future business with that customer, in the name of collecting a big win today
possibly break the support and delivery organizations, with low margin but high volume that deal would generate
make Legal and Finance departments apoplectic with all the custom one-off terms and costly benefits of the deal
In short, that Mercenary rep looks to make a killing today, to make this quarter at the longer term expense of the company, its profitability, and its future. Often, companies go for Mercenary deals because they desperately need that revenue to hit investor expectations.
Nailed it with that definition, Naman, I thought.
Mercenary: a hired gun absolutely killing it. And maybe killing the future for some big money today.
Because they are high risk opportunities, the Mercenary almost never closes these deals. Rather, he usually lives off his other run-rate and lower tier deals while tantalizing management with a giant opportunity that is just out of reach. Yet his managers lust after the big numbers Mercenary deals represent in his pipeline. And sometimes they do come through.
Meanwhile, Finance argues endlessly against the dangerous and precedent-breaking pricing and terms the Mercenary wants to offer, and most others in the organization pray to God that those deals don’t happen. If they come through, they will cause all manner of mayhem including:
client pricing parity issues when other reps and customers find out (“Hey, you gave this guy X pricing, I’m deserving of the same!”
margin problems “How are we supposed to deliver that?”,
massive delivery and service issues “So, you expect us to provide support services at that low rate?”
The Mercenary. Slaying all — the quarter, the year, the territory, the delivery and customer service organizations in exchange for lots of money today.
Which is best?
Well, then, what type of sales orientation is the best? I suppose if your organization is a Philanthropy, you may will some Philanthropic sales people. Even then, you’ll probably want some other orientations (Your non-profit’s Development Sales — reps seeking donations — can’t “give it away,” can they?)
Probably every sales organization will be hiring Hungry & Afraid-oriented sales people. Sales management systems are set up to manage and reward them and they scale nicely. These will be your backbone.
And organizations often want some Mercenaries. Though if honest, they would tell you that while they crave the big deals, Mercenaries can utterly destroy an organization with their huge, risky, eccentric deals, if the organization has to digest too many of them.
But no organization I know, wants Chickensh*ts, despite the fact that we all end up with more of them than we want.