One of my favorite things to do on Friday mornings is to listen to Matt Heinz and Brent Adamson’s “Coffee with Brent/Matt.” If you aren’t watching it, you should. It’s huge fun–and every once in a while they get onto some really interesting issues.
Brent made a comment, “There’s room for humanity in business…..”
It struck me oddly, my initial reaction was, “Well duhhhh! Thanks for the insight, Brent.” (One of my missions in life is to harass Brent, and he, gleefully, reciprocates.).
But on reflection, I realized that his observation is an indication of how “we”–all of us, have lost our way.
Business and commerce exist because and for people! It’s all about people seeking to achieve, seeking to satisfy the wants, needs, dreams of each other. Business is would not exist if some group of people wanted to do something and another group of people could help them do that (either through buying or selling.)
Try to imagine a business world–completely devoid of people. Would ChatGPT and Bard, start prompting each other for ideas on how deal with Bing? Would Pi and Chatsonic conspire to seize share from ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing? Why would they care? What objectives would they have in doing it? What revenue objectives would they have? Would they independently go to a buying bot to purchase more servers to support more conversations? Do they even have Venmo or Paypal accounts so they can pay each other? Does ChatGPT charge Bard $20/month for it’s coaching and advice?
These tools and technologies, any tool technology, doesn’t exist for their own benefit, they exist to serve the needs of people who use the tools. Perhaps They make these people more efficient. Perhaps doing things humans can’t easily do. Perhaps to enable humans to spend their time on doing things that only humans can do. But the need for these tools would be non-existent if it weren’t for people.
And this extends to any tool or technology. They are created by people to serve people, directly or indirectly.
Business is about and for people. Business exists only because of people wanting to do something, wanting to change, wanting to grow, wanting achieve.
Why is the statement, “There is room for humanity in business,” be so profound?
I think that it’s an indication of how badly “we” have gone off target. We’ve forgotten about people interacting with people. We’ve forgotten that if we don’t have this interaction, there is no need for business.
The issue of whether there is room for humanity in business is not an issue about the technology. It’s an issue about people interacting with each other and how too many are trying to “dehumanize” these interactions.
We are driven to mechanize everything we do. While much of that is good, it frees people to do things that only people can do, we have mechanized and dehumanized our engagement with those people. People are replaceable widgets. If one isn’t performing the way we want, we replace that person. People want to be heard, they want to be valued, and if they don’t find it in the organization they work for, they go someplace else, and then another place, and then another place. People thrive on true “connection.” (Not connections.)
Increasingly, we find human to human interactions too messy and time consuming. So we start to displace those with machine to human reactions. And people feel know longer feel heard, that they don’t count. They don’t feel included or cared for. They are frightened or confused, they need help. They may not understand, they may be blind to an opportunity.
I decided to have a conversation with ChatGPT. I mean, who needs people. I posed the question, “Is there room for humanity in business….”
The conversation was disappointing. As I asked questions, ChatGPT made statement after statement. It provided best practices and “insights” that one could read in any business book, personal development book, whatever. Nothing I didn’t know or hadn’t read anywhere.
But the big missing thing was the fact that ChatGPT never posed a question. “Dave, can you explain a little more about why you are asking this question? Has something happened in your interaction with clients? Is there something that has happened that causes you to ask this? Why is this so important to you now, you’ve never asked me before?” It never sought to understand more deeply, never cared about why I asked the questions and what I wanted to achieve. It didn’t seek to understand me. It gave me principles and issues to think about, but didn’t provide me a framework about which one or two might be important for me.
Understanding these are key to our business success. We know that business is not the exercise of logical answers, facts and data. We know people struggle, they don’t know what they should be doing, they don’t know what they should be thinking about, they don’t have confidence, they are confused and overwhelmed.
We see research study after research study identifying why people fail to buy, why a project may fail, why a business may not achieve it’s goals. The facts and data are seldom the issue, but how people respond to and act on those is usually the issue.
Yet, we continue to design the humanity out of our processes. Perhaps, because it’s messy and inefficient. Perhaps because our own vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and fears arise in these conversations.
But we seem committed to a path of designing humanity out of business, failing to recognize, if it weren’t for other humans, we would not be able to achieve our goals or even conduct business.
The fact that Brent and so many others are asking the question, “Is there room for humanity in business,” is a huge red flag for all of us.
I agree!!
I’d contend that going forward, as it probably has been for a number of years already, a major element of a successful differentiator for a business is how it ‘does humanity’.
People, whether a solo business owner or an employee in a 20,000 strong global giant of its industry, have changed the way they make decisions around purchases. A major part of their challenge is in identifying possible solutions, possible partners, evaluating them, shortlisting them and then making a final decision. And way too often, if this process becomes too challenging, too difficult, to risky (as they perceive it) then the decision they make is to stick with their current situation, either permanently, or “for now” – which is really the same thing.
Helping people through that decision-making process so they can make the best decision for them, not us, is of huge value. One that is very often overlooked, and when it isn’t, it’s very often underestimated.
Operating in the way I’ve just briefly described is something that only truly works when we come at it from a position of ‘doing humanity’. Some may say that this is tosh, that the situation is business – “this isn’t personal, this is business, and I’m here to make the sale, to make my quota, get the commission check to pay for the family vacation and to keep my job (and healthcare).”
Well, for the person at the client or prospect organization, it IS personal. Business is unavoidably rooted in the dynamics of human interaction. The days of ignoring this are over – have been for a while. What’s my evidence for this assertion? I’m glad you asked!!
Let’s start with the fact that the annual survey of how many sales people are making quota has shown a steady decline since 2012, where it was approx. 62%. It’s been under 50% for a few years, even before Covid struck. At the same time companies haven’t seen a similar drop in sales performance at the organization level. This tells me taking sales people out of the equation hasn’t hurt. And why take sales people out of the equation? Because they don’t bring any value to it. Instead clients have shifted their focus to online approaches, including e-auctions. But sellers hate this – I mean the seller organization here. Because it removes the opportunity to better understand what the client is trying to do, and to craft an appropriate solution that is better for the client as well as the seller’s top & bottom lines. It’s commoditized the process.
BUT… increasingly the tide seems to be turning… this on-line approach has many benefits for certain kinds of situations. But it has also created problems for many clients – a reducing pool of potential partners & suppliers, quality issues, delivery issues and so on… and little by way of a meaningful relationship between seller and buyer on which to base a meaningful solution on, one that benefits both parties.
So what have seller organizations been doing in response?
I’ve been paying close attention to the sales enablement hiring focus of many industries over the past 6 months or so and have noticed a very dominant characteristic – companies looking to hire into a sales enablement function are looking for recently ex-sales people or sales people looking to do something different… essentially with pushing products… as if sticking the label “Sales Enablement” on that will fix their shorter term revenue challenges and their longer term survivability challenges.
The world is changing – globalization is being deliberately unwound, and this is going to impact businesses who on the face of it believe they’re not impacted or haven’t been impacted by globalization directly in the last 30-40 years.
As this all unwinds we’re going to see a lot more competition ‘back home’. And if you seek to differentiate yourself largely on your products and your standard ‘solutions’ you plan to tailor a little, well, you’re basically screwed – the term “dead man walking” springs to mind!
Focusing on products & standard-ish solutions, product-centric play books, battle cards, presentations, pitches and scripts has some value to the seller organization. Structure enables easier measurement and analysis. Tech stacks like Salesforce.com, gong.io and many others are seen as key to help manage, collate and deploy all these resources to the sales person in the Field. But that in turn means training, refresher training, compliance management and time required to enter data in to these systems so the metrics can be measured and decisions taken.
Enter stage left the role of “Sales Enablement” – a function intended by many (most?) to take care of all this ‘stuff’… and to share some, if not all, ownership for revenue results and so on, to make it more ‘strategic’ and ‘relevant’… I get it.
But all of this totally misses that ‘X’ factor that really is the difference that makes the difference… the human being (and not the human doing!!).
We humans are social animals, and have been for quite a while now, at least several hundred thousand years. When we see other creatures exhibiting similar social behavior we tend to describe them in human terms. Deliberately setting aside this very human aspect of our nature when it comes to business is asking for trouble long term. It’s establishing a cause for a problem we are already blind to, and so will find extremely difficult to identify and solve. Instead we fall back on “well, if the price had been better the client would have bought” and “we don’t have the product/service this market needs”, rather than “we’re not helping clients to make critical and often difficult decisions, it’s no wonder they didn’t buy from us – or anybody… we should adapt, evolve so we can help in this area.”
Sound familiar? I thought so!
The next question then is “how do should/could we ‘do humanity’?”
I have some thoughts, but that’s perhaps for a different thread…
Thanks so much Martin. It is so important, and you have expressed it so well.
While it deserves much more conversation, the starting response to “How do should/could we ‘do humanity?'” It’s first by being human and deeply caring.