The art of selling in a machine learning age
- Summary:
- As machines take on more functions, how can we best meld what the machines are telling us with the need for human intuition in activities like sales?
Regardless, Tzu is off the front burner now and management fads have moved on. Even so, the war metaphor is revived regularly, most recently by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden in Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously. Gothelf and Seiden write about flattening the hierarchy and putting more decision-making power into the hands of the people doing the real work.
The book is excerpted in the Harvard Business Review as You Need to Manage Digital Projects for Outcomes, Not Outputs and the article tells an interesting tale first surfaced by Stephen Bungay in his book The Art of Action tracing a concept called Mission Command back through history.
Mission Command was developed in the 19th century by the Prussian military to deal with the uncertainties of the battle field. According to the authors,
Mission command is built on three important principles that guide the way leaders direct their people.
- Do not command more than necessary or plan beyond foreseeable circumstances.
- Communicate to every unit as much of the higher intent as is necessary to achieve the purpose.
- Ensure that everyone retains freedom of decision within bounds.
Their point is that even in the best circumstances, the people on the ground in whatever situation they find themselves will be best equipped to make split-second decisions and ought to have the freedom to do so. The alternative is ridiculously detailed planning and I wonder if all the talk about AI and machine learning are sending us down a similar but different road.
The similarity I think of is regimentation and reducing the latitude often given line of business people. The difference is that rather than relying on detailed plans we are now turning our attention to machines to make big decisions. One of the challenges is that novel situations arise that we haven’t programmed and machines can (and do) shut down when you need them most.
While the authors focus on developing digital products like software in this piece, my first thoughts were of selling and the sales process. My ongoing research tells me there is a lot of wasted time and effort in selling, although technology has certainly reduced waste. Many sales people I know went into selling precisely because it was unpredictable. That’s one of the reasons I went into selling back in the dark ages. In selling you don’t know what you’ll be doing later today and that’s as appealing as knowing that you’ll need to use your wits to figure out the next move. So to my mind Mission Command is an ideal structure, at least for selling.
According to research published in Harvard Business Review, the most successful Customer Service Representaitves closely and naturally mimic the best aspects of Mission Command. They take agency and get stuff done. While we’re at it, a couple of books ago, I profiled the CRM company HubSpot and its innovative corporate culture. At the heart of the culture is Mission Command, for which they have a motto: “We get Shit done.”
So, I’d say that the old Prussian idea of Mission Command found a home, at least in the West where people value freedom and self determination. At the same time I worry that we might fall in love with AI and ML to our own detriment and on this I am torn. I’ve also recently written about heuristics and the groundbreaking research to which Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky devoted their careers. They documented how the human brain, relying on heuristics, can trick itself into believing things that ain’t necessarily so making mistakes in the process.
So we’re left with a real conundrum. We know about and see the upside of algorithms, AI, ML and more, but we also know and appreciate the freedom that comes with Mission Command. Which to apply?
My take
No decision tool will ever be perfect for all circumstances in business or in life. But the dichotomy being set up by some old style thinking coming into close proximity with new technology should give us all pause. If you are a split-the-difference person you might say use both but I think that’s just a heuristic firing so that you don’t have to do the hard work of learning and knowing.
The real answer is that more than ever we need to display a healthy skepticism about reality based upon critical thinking. Taking that approach allows us to take benefit from the power of machine support for decision-making while allowing ourselves the space to scrutinize and sometimes reject the tactics the machines are pointing towards.
Machines are definitely making decisions easier at some levels but we are still responsible for the outcomes. And that's the point.