How One Psychological Effect Can Impact Sales–In A Good Way
This guest post comes from Steve Richard at ExecVision. Steve is an experienced sales leader whose life’s mission is to to help sales professionals become wildly successful.
I love studying buying and selling to understanding why buyers and sellers behave the way they do. Psychology is at play everywhere in sales.
A little known, fascinating psychology principle called the Hawthorne Effect is a perfect example. Any sales leader who is implementing call recording to improve rep performance needs to know the Hawthorne Effect and its impact.
What is the Hawthorne Effect?
When a person is aware they are being observed, they tend to modify their behavior. If you’ve ever had a slew of typos when someone is looking over your shoulder, it’s because your brain is reacting to the observation. This is known as the Hawthorne Effect.
Also known as the observer effect, the Hawthorne Effect was coined by Henry A. Landberger in the 1950s. Landberger had been analyzing the results of earlier studies conducted at the Hawthorne Works factory in the 1920s.
The initial study was investigating whether changing the level of light would affect worker productivity. The findings were inconclusive, because every time the amount of light was changed, there was a productivity boost.
Elton Mayo, the primary researcher on the Hawthorne Works studies determined that because the workers knew they were being observed, they changed their behavior. Mayo concluded that because the workers felt important and enjoyed being singled out, they worked harder.
The Hawthorne Effect & Call Recording
For researchers, the Hawthorne Effect is an unavoidable bias that can skew the results of their studies. For sales leaders, it’s another reason to:
- Start recording calls if you’re not already
- Actually listen to the calls and use the data within them
If you’re not currently recording your reps calls, you can expect to see a bump in productivity when a call recording program is implemented due to the observer effect. Reps will be inclined to perform better simply because they know they are being watched. When doing this you must be careful to create a positive, productive environment to avoid call recording being seen as Big Brother.
At organizations where calls are already being recorded, the Hawthorne Effect can still come into play. Call recordings may currently sit unused for coaching, or only a handful are listened to each month.
Instead of letting that remain the status quo, make call recordings the primary source for coaching over ride-alongs. When reps know that any one of their calls may be listened to at any given time, their productivity should increase.
In the experiments that uncovered the Hawthorne Effect, the productivity increase dissipated as soon as the studies were over. With a call recording program, the ‘study’ never really ends, so the initial boost in productivity will eventually become the baseline.
This is where a strong coaching program can help continue the upward trajectory. When your reps are being coached on a regular basis, their performance will continue to improve. Conversation Intelligence software makes coaching easy, especially as teams scale, and it also produces some level of the observer effect.
