Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sujan Patel, CEO of Mailshake. Among other things, we discussed how leading companies define Ideal Customer Profile.
Have a listen and share your thoughts on Twitter and LinkedIn. Oh, and for a full webinar transcript and more great sales related content, check out Mailshake’s blog.
As a society, we place value in confidence. Confident people are consistently rewarded with higher pay, better relationships, and greater influence and control over their circumstances. They lead happier lives.
And this makes sense: Humans value certainty, so it follows that we’d prefer to associate with individuals who appear to be more certain of themselves and their beliefs because they appear to have more control over their lives and surroundings than those who don’t. Confident individuals seem to have greater insight into how the world is, and how events will turn out, and we’re attracted to that certainty.
One would think that as our world becomes more transparent, and knowledge about the world becomes more readily available, an individual’s confidence would become proportionally less valuable to others. In other words, as it becomes easier to independently determine the truth about what someone is confident about, (e.g. is San Francisco really the capital of California? Let me check Wikipedia. Are the Ravens really more likely to beat the 49ers? Let me check the Vegas line), using human confidence as a shortcut to determine what’s really going on should become less important.
What is peculiar, however, is that this is not true. Not at all. As a matter of fact, society continues to reward overconfidence. For the purpose of this post, I define overconfidence simply as “a level of confidence that is miscalibrated to the level of confidence appropriate to the circumstances” (for example, I am twice as good at Greg at ping pong, but I behave as if I were 10X better).
The idea behind why overconfidence is advantageous is that “it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success.”
In other words, overconfidence, on its own, can help the overconfident individual win. A self-reinforcing pattern emerges in these individuals’ minds, and overtime, they actually begin to use overconfidence as a tool.
If you have spent time with a star salesperson or athlete, you can likely attest to this phenomenon’s existence. The sheer energy those individuals emanate makes those around them feel secure. Teammates push themselves harder. Adversaries become riddled with doubt. As a buyer, you find yourself wanting to agree with them and associate with them -- even if you don’t have anything in common, find them to be slightly arrogant, or don’t even like them as a person.
While overconfidence can be an asset in business, it can also lead to problems -- especially with respect to decision making. Overconfident “experts” --not only salespeople, but Wall Street executives, doctors, and military leaders -- routinely make impaired decisions because they end up believing their own bullshit. And society suffers as a result: economic recessions, malpractice, military defeats -- have all happened as the result of overconfidence.
Take for instance, the Battle of Gallipoli.The Battle of Gallipolli was the Turks' greatest victory of WWI.
To set the stage, Britain at this time was at the height of its power. An unrivaled colonial superstar. Winston Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, had a brilliant idea to knock Turkey out of the war by launching a naval and land campaign to open up the Dardanelles straits, which was heavily defended on its western shore. From there, the Brits could have used Gallipoli as a base to attack Constantinople -- knocking Turkey out of the war. They could have also used that base to launch an attack on and on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s less protected underbelly. If they had been successful, they could have ended the war 2-3 years earlier.
By just about any measure, the Turks were no match for British forces. While this campaign was not going to be a cakewalk for the Brits, they were a clear favorite by most accounts. They were not only a superior fighting force, they also initially outnumbered the Turks 10 to 1.
The problem was, the Brits knew this.
Before the attack, Sir Ian Hamilton, the highly decorated Allied Commander leading the campaign, wrote in his diary
“Let me bring my lads face to face with Turks in the open field, we must beat them every time because British volunteer soldiers are superior individuals to Anatolians, Syrians or Arabs and are animated with a superior ideal and an equal joy in battle.”
The Brits’ overconfidence prevented them from accurately reading the situation on the ground and adapting to it. While they outnumbered the Turks initially, this quickly changed as the Turks brought in reinforcements. Because of their initial advantage and misreading of the proportion of advantage, the Brits brought far fewer reinforcements than they needed. Fewer guns. Less water. And they took their sweet time doing it all. By some accounts, the British forces were barbecuing and sunbathing on the beach instead of preparing for battle for days on end. Even Sir Ian Hamilton was posted up on an island about an hour away from the action until news reached him that the battle was going awry. But by then it was too late.
Map of Europe during WWI, arrow points to Gallipoli
The Battle of Gallipoli turned out to be a disaster for the Allies. After eight months of fighting, no real progress, and an estimated 250,000 casualties, Britain decided to abandon the campaign.
So what happened? Were Winston Churchill, and Sir Ian Hamilton incompetent in their management of this initaitive?
No.
They were not incompetent. They were overconfident.
Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
And the Brits weren’t overconfident in Gallipoli because the battle was unimportant; they were overconfident because of how important the battle was. Because it was so high stakes, and because they were so good, they likely resorted to overconfidence as a mechanism to aid in battle. The problem is, the existence of overconfidence as an actual standalone tool does not exist. It is a phenomenon that humans relate to success in a sociological sense, giving it the power to affect change. But overconfidence cannot change the terrain in a battle. It cannot turn the weather in your favor. And most importantly, overconfidence is not enough to make up for lack of preparation and complacency.
Overconfidence happens in highly competitive conditions, complex conditions, or conditions of real stress. It becomes a problem when people get older or more experienced, when they are doing things they feel very strongly about, or when things are very difficult.
Andy Grove knew this, writing in Only the Paranoid Survive, “Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.”
If you look at the “Closed Lost Reasons” in your CRM today, you will not find “Overconfidence” as an option. But if you were to think through the cause of the losses you or your team has suffered, overconfidence is likely at the root of some of them:
The prospect went with a competitor because you thought your product was so good you did not need to prepare as much as your competitor did for that key meeting.
Your product was deemed “too expensive” because you failed to properly explain the value of your product, as you thought that value was evident.
You didn’t think it was imperative to develop a relationship with the new CFO because the results of the value assessment should be enough.
The fine line we must walk as sales professionals is one where we embrace confidence, even overconfidence. We must not only display overconfidence: we must actually be overconfident. But we must not allow overconfidence to make mistakes of preparation or underestimation.
Show up prepared. Multithread the deal. Get a second opinion on everything. And most importantly, never underestimate the competition.
Active Reflection
& The Sum of What We Aren’t
In the summer of 2013, I dropped out of my MBA program. Despite the gravity of such a decision, it was an easy one to make.
The framework I used to arrive at this decision came from --oddly enough-- advice that a professor had given my incoming class.
She wrote three words on the whiteboard at the start of our first lecture.
Family
Work
School
We can do two of the three well, she said. But in order to be great at any one thing, the other two parts of the equation will necessarily suffer. In order to achieve our goals, we must be active in considering what we will sacrifice. What we are is mostly the sum of what we aren’t.
She asked us to consider our personal and professional goals in relation to what we would be focused on in the coming year. She advised us to be deliberate in our planning and shrewd in terms of what we accept into our workload.
At the end of the lecture, the professor asked us to revisit this exercise at the start of each quarter, and to recalibrate our life decisions based on changes to our circumstances and our objectives.
I found this assignment to be much easier to complete and receive value from than many of my classmates. What made it easy was that I had already obsessed over my goals ahead of graduate school. Moreover, my decision to get an MBA was no more than a means for achieving some of my most critical goals, as other goals were financially dependent on achieving these. The two goals were:
Move into a leadership role at a fast-growing technology company within two years.
Move into a VP/executive role within five years.
In retrospect, this may have been the most valuable lecture of my academic career (or maybe it was the class where we learned how to perform a VLOOKUP, I’m not sure). Regardless, I took our professor’s advice to heart. I committed to reflecting and structuring my behavior based on my goals on a recurring basis.
A year later, I was fortunate enough to join a fast-growing startup just before their Series A. Soon after, I was promoted into a leadership role, and I found myself building, then leading, a global team. I saw the path to achieving my five-year objective. I knew I needed to be laser-focused on my career in order to get there. Upon reflection, I realized business school had become a distraction... So I dropped out.
The thing I’ve learned about desire is that it’s easy to want things. However, getting what we want is not easy. In order to get what we want, we need to be deliberate about understanding our desires holistically. And we must be willing to sacrifice the less important.
A polarizing 20th century philosopher who thought about this a great deal is Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, most agree she was a ruthlessly self-interested thinker who was hell-bent on getting the most out of her circumstances.
In Philosophy: Who Needs It, Rand argues for the importance of reflection, which she says allows us to be deliberate about developing our lives on our own terms. She suggests that we all must do this in order to avoid being manipulated by external forces.
Referencing the person who avoids reflection she writes, ‘When such a man considers a goal or desire he wants to achieve, the first question in his mind is: “Can I do it?”—not “What is required to do it?”’
In other words, when presented with tasks, assignments, or requests, we should not try to complete them as quickly as possible to hurry on with our lives. We should first consider their relationship to our goals and personal philosophies. If the tasks do not further us in our quest to be the things we want, we should eliminate them from Asana.
I remain committed to this framework for evaluating and reevaluating what I’m doing and reconciling it with where I want to go. I try to do this quarterly, but life happens, so I sometimes end up doing it at the start of each year.
What about you? What are your priorities? What will you give up in order to achieve greatness in another part of your life?
BFG Consulting is a San Francisco based consulting firm founded in 2015. Our goal is to assist early stage technology companies in growing revenue by helping take their products to market in a repeatable and scalable way.
