Dating Dynamics and Sales Quotas
This past week at work, the head of our sales organization (the Chief Revenue Officer or CRO) was hosting a talk sponsored by my company’s Women-In-Tech group and he said something that stuck with me:
“The front-line, quota-carrying sales roles involve a lot of risk and rejection.”
In the world of dating, men take more risks and experience much more rejection. Selling is obviously different from dating but consider a similar argument from The Better Angels of Our Nature — a book explaining the factors that have been contributing to the historical decline in rates of violence:
A few hundred years ago, there was an increase in the number of books published about having good manners and a decrease in rates of violence in places where these books circulated. The theory is that practicing table manners was a good way to practice self control, and the benefits proliferated throughout other areas of people’s lives. Managing the primal desire to stuff your face with food meant that you were better prepared to manage the primal desire to stab someone when you disagreed with him.
Since the beginning of human history, men have been expected to show initiative and take chances to find their match. There are plenty of evolutionary psychology books written about why that’s the case, but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this partly explains why men are more highly represented in sales roles and other professions that require us to take chances.
The CRO was answering a question about our efforts to increase diversity in the sales organization when he said the line about risk and rejection. He said we’re starting to use different ways of sourcing candidates because people’s networks often look a lot like they do. It takes a lot of courage for a leader to get up in front a big group to answer hard questions about sensitive subjects, and it’s reassuring to work at a company that’s making efforts to be more inclusive — especially when you hear the horror stories from places like Uber. Another interesting tidbit he shared was that the women he knows in sales often have partners with more stable professions to mitigate the risk of a commission-based income.
In Top Dog, a book that explores the science behind competition, the authors found that women are better at assessing risk — which actually makes them more successful in professions like portfolio management — but a side effect is that they’re less likely to compete when they face long odds. The authors explain that this is part of the reason we have fewer women in politics. If Donald Trump were a woman (pictured here), he probably wouldn’t be president because he initially had such a small chance of winning that he wouldn’t have run.
Biology has a tendency to push us away from perfect equality in the workplace, so we should stop being so hard on ourselves for not achieving it. But it’s always possible to respect each other as individuals and factor different perspectives into our decision-making processes, so that’s where I’ll try to start.
