Can growing a beard help you close more deals?

Published: Wed, 08/10/22

August 10, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back. On this day in history in 1793, the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum, opened in Paris – if you look closely, you can still see some of your “fresh” leads hanging there on display. In this week’s edition of The Quota, we’ll explain how beards on men and (less) makeup on women can help drive up your sales, share a Sales Fail about a customer who thought he knew everything, and give some advice to a manager whose training course didn’t seem to stick. Here we go.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

2.46 - 3.26

Sales conversion rates across industries have an average of 2.46% - 3.26%

Source: Statista

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

The New Yorker recently ran a long profile on Sam Taggart, a well-known door-to-door sales guru who is trying to elevate the profession. The profile goes deep into Taggart’s history, as well as the history of D2D sales in the United States. You can read the article here (warning: it’s extremely long).
Salesforce, the company permanently embedded in our sales brains, recently announced an executive team overhaul, moving their head of customer success to a COO role, and promoting their chief revenue officer to chief strategy officer. The company said the changes would help them on their “path to 50B in revenue.” You can read about the changes here.

FEATURE

How Beards on Men and Makeup on Women Drive Sales

The news out of consumer-behavior-research-land is actually good for a change: both women and men in sales can probably spend less time getting ready in the morning!

Consumer-behavior psychologist Sarah Mittal has been doing research on the effects of beards on men and makeup on women since 2018. She discovered that facial hair on a salesperson increased people’s perceptions of expertise and trust, whereas the more makeup a saleswoman wore, the less trustworthy people judged her to be. Her paper showing these findings was published in the Journal of Business Research in August of 2021.

Dr. Mittal became interested in this subject when her husband, the co-owner of a building-controls automation company, mentioned that he felt his clients didn’t take him as seriously when he was clean-shaven, owing to his boyish face. Dr. Mittal promised him she would read up on the subject, but she didn’t find any research about the effects of facial hair in the sales professions, so she decided to create a study of her own.

In her first study, Dr. Mittal asked 127 participants to pretend they were shopping for a tablet or laptop online. When participants clicked through, they were shown a page of a random salesman nicknamed “Mike” with four different kinds of facial hair – clean shaven, mustache, handlebar mustache, and full beard. They were then asked to rate Mike as a salesperson on his trustworthiness, his expertise, his likability, and his attractiveness.

The bearded version of Mike scored 10.6% higher for expertise and 11.6% higher for trustworthiness when compared with the clean-shaven version. Additionally, Dr. Mittal found no noticeable difference between the ratings for a clean-shaven face and one with a 5 o’clock shadow, nor between faces with different lengths of beard. Even when she changed variables like the ethnicity of the man in the picture, the results were consistent across the board.

“People use beards as a subliminal cue of knowledge when there is no other information provided,” Dr. Mittal told the Wall Street Journal. “The fact that the beard drives such a statistically significant effect with even that limited information shows that facial hair provides a lot of bang for your buck.”

Interested in what similar studies of women’s appearances would show, Dr. Mittal conducted a study testing different levels of makeup on saleswomen. She offered study participants four levels on which to judge the women pictured on their screens – no makeup, a “natural” look (aka “no make-up makeup look”), a “professional” face, and a “glamorous/extreme” face.

There was essentially no difference between the trustworthiness ratings of the clean and natural looks. But as soon as participants saw the “professional makeup” faces, they started rating the women lower on that scale. The ratings were even lower for the glamorous look.

Dr. Mittal said she believes this is because women who have a full face of makeup are assumed to be putting on a front, and are therefore not to be trusted.

So ladies, put down your Color Strike Cream to Powder Eye Shadow Pen Makeup. And gentlemen: consider yourselves lucky that you don’t know what that is. But, you might want to go ahead and start growing out that beard, especially if you want to make a bit more money.

BETTER PROSPECTING? YES, PLEASE

Datanyze is a unique B2B contact assistant. Our tool enables sales reps to connect with their ideal prospects and enriches Linkedin profiles in real-time with email addresses and direct dial phone numbers.

You can also leverage Datanyze's free Directory pages to get more insights into your ideal prospects, including, but not limited to, ice breakers - curated information to arm you with related data on what's happening in a prospect’s world.

You can learn more about Datanyze here.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Which company is credited with opening the world’s first sales training school?

A. Firestone Tire and Rubber Company
B. The Philadelphia Contributionship Insurance Company
C. IBM
D. The National Cash Register Company

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

“I sold cars for over a decade, and saw some hilarious stuff over the years, but there’s one story that sticks out to me above the others.

This guy came in to look at a Ford Ranger truck. We had taken it in on trade; it was used with high miles, but we had priced it pretty aggressively.

The guy was a bit older, and seemed friendly at first, but right away he started trying to dominate the conversation (which is fine), but he was basically trying to position himself as a vehicle expert, pointing out various things about the trucks we had on our lot. I was just agreeing with him and letting him talk – wasn’t sure if he was a buyer or not since we had a lot of these types come in who just wanted to talk for hours.

So we get to the Ranger and he starts inspecting it really carefully, and using technical terms that even I didn’t understand (I was a salesman, not a mechanic). He’s looking at it extremely carefully, getting on his back under the bed to look at the exhaust and everything. Then he says something about “four-wheel drive suspension.”

Now, I knew for a fact that this was a RWD truck. So I clarified that “This one is rear-wheel drive.” He looks at me and says, “No it’s not. Ford doesn’t make a rear-wheel drive Ranger.” So I asked if he wanted to see the paperwork, and he absolutely lost it on me. He started shouting that I was trying to trick him (???) and that all of us salesmen were the same, and that I had another thing coming if I thought he was gonna let me rip him off (which is strange since the 4WD would’ve been more expensive).

He laid into me for a few minutes then stormed off back to his car. But that wasn’t the last I saw of him. For the next year, he would drive by our dealership, honk, and flip off whoever was in the parking lot. Oh, and we sold that Ranger to someone else the next day.”

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- August 2022

WORTH A PEEK

Curious about those sales slang terms you keep hearing on LinkedIn (and sometimes, in this newsletter)? An article on Nutshell’s blog covers the 30 slang terms every sales rep should know; from BANT, to bluebird (?), to the puppy dog close (woof), the list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, but it’s pretty fun. You can read it here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I'm a sales manager at a mid-sized company that sells financial services to individuals. I manage a team of 10 reps. I recently hired a sales trainer to run a full-day workshop (over Zoom). The trainer came highly recommended from a friend who is also a sales manager. He couldn't say enough good things about the training and how it helped his team.

My team seemed engaged (enough) during the session, although I did hear some grumbles from a few reps about losing out on time that could be spent selling. Overall, I felt that it was a success, and that the trainer had new and interesting strategies that we weren't using.

The problem is, it's been two weeks now and it doesn't seem like any of the reps are using the new playbook or tactics from the training session. Every time I bring it up they either dodge the question or make up some excuse for why they are still doing things the old way. I invested a lot of time and money in this new training to help the team, and it seems like they are totally uninterested. How can I get them motivated to at least give it a chance?

Wondering in North America

Dear Wondering,

Thanks for writing in. While we’re not experts in sales training, we know a few people who are, so we reached out to Samantha McKenna, CEO of #samsales, a sales and sales leadership expert, to get her take.

Here’s what she said:

1. A full day of training can be...a lot. And teams tend to retain 10% of what they learn without reinforcement. If it was a one-and-done training without reinforcement, it's going to be tough to build those new muscles.

2. "If it's measured, it'll be done" – is the squad being measured, spiff'd, or KPI'd on the new sales processes?

3. Oftentimes, we see trainers introduce a new 32-step method to sales rather than saying, "Here are ten small changes you can make to what you already do really well." If there's too much to follow, you put adoption at risk.

4. Pull one of your top performers aside and ask them directly why they haven't adopted the new practices. You’ll know if your top performers find value in something; they'll be the first to adopt it. But if they aren't, it could be a sign that the training didn't resonate.

5. Call #samsales next time! Wait… what? Who said that?

Quiz Answer: D - you can read the source article here

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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