What a Chimp Taught Me About Business

A vital key to winning in any business is getting control of material expenses. But, what if you can’t see the expenses that are the most material? What if your greatest expense of all is lurking unseen in your business, elusively dodging your notice, killing your bottom line, and holding you back from all of your wildest dreams?

The greatest assassin of your goals is you. At least it’s part of you. That killer is your preconceived notions.

Your preconceived notions dictate how you deal with customers, control the value you place on leads, and determine how much value you place on your time.  These preconceived notions make you blind, thereby distorting your perception of the truth.

Here are some examples:

If you have a preconceived notion that the lead you are receiving is cold, you are less likely to close that lead than someone who believes it’s warm.

If you have a preconceived notion that your value as a sales person is worth 4X, you will get paid less than an identical salesperson who believes their value is 6X.

Your preconceived notion that people hate a salesperson who door knocks or cold calls, not only inhibits your close rate, but in many instances blocks your ability to even do that part of the job.

A story…

I recently read a book about famed primatologist and anthropologist, Jane Goodall. She is the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees as she has now been studying them for almost sixty years. There is less than 2% difference between chimpanzee DNA and that of humans which is one of the reasons why her work is so important.

Goodall's story is fascinating because she ended up in a jungle of Tanzania quite by accident in 1960.  She had no formal training in the field of primates, as her previous job was that of a secretary. But, she loved travel and trying new things, and so when she was offered the opportunity to study chimpanzee behavior by her anthropologist friend, Louis Leakey, she immediately said yes.

Her 1960 trip into the jungle was to be a short one (I believe 3-4 months) and her sole job was to watch, follow, and note the behavior of chimpanzees. Right as her trip was about to end, she noticed one of the chimpanzees who she named David Gray Beard, use a long blade of grass to fish termites out of a giant mound of dirt. Soon after, she noticed other chimps doing the same.  Goodall wrote back to Louis Leakey that she was fascinated by the ability of the chimpanzees to craft a tool (blades of grass or long sticks) that could be used to create a desired result (fish termites).

What’s engrossing about Goodall's story is that up until that time, nobody in the field had realized that chimpanzees were capable of tool making (a very advanced thought process for a primate). How was it possible that no other primatologist had realized this? According to Leakey, most people see what they expect to see. Why? They have preconceived notions.

In fact Leakey had specifically selected Goodall for the job of observing those chimpanzees almost 60 years ago because he knew she’d be the first person to observe chimps with no preconceived notions as to what she was looking for. And that’s why, according to Leakey, she was the first one ever to document a chimp’s ability to create a tool.

By the way, when National Geographic got word of her research, they issued a grant to keep Goodall’s project going beyond the original few months of observation. Now, 58 years later they are still observing and reporting chimpanzee behavior from Tanzania.

Why this matters to you....

What if you believed every lead you received was a hot lead?

What if you believed your value is 10X that of other sales people?

What if you believed people look forward to hearing from a pleasant salesperson who calls or door knocks?

Breaking your preconceived notions will lead to breakthroughs in sales production.

I recently went through a breakthrough of my own, and it had everything to do with Jane Goodall and her chimps.

In the 18 years I’ve been running a real estate brokerage, I’ve always been against recruiting brand new sales people to the team. My thought process (ie. my preconceived notion) was that new people typically won’t make it,  they come with great liability because they don’t understand the rules, regulations, and laws, and they are a burden to our bottom line. But then I realized, all of that conjecture was just in my head. It was all preconceived notions.

And so I spent the first half of 2018 building a killer training system to try out on some brand new agents.

Because what if my preconceived notions were wrong?

What if the 17 agents who just completed my 30 day sales academy for real estate agents are the Jane Goodall’s who are so new to the business that they don’t know the difference between cold leads and warm ones, and who believe they are worth more than other sales people, and had no idea that someone might not be excited to hear from them when they cold call or door knock?

There’s a little bit of beauty in taking on new sales team members who aren’t poisoned by preconceived notions. They are fresh and new, like Jane Goodall on her initial study of chimpanzees in 1960. Like Goodall, there's beauty in the fact that these new agents can see what they see, not what they expect to see.

And as for those of us who are poisoned by the nonsensical preconceived notions that bind us to a less fruitful reality? Well, it's not too late for us. Once you know that they are lurking in your reality, you begin to notice them, and then the beauty of flushing them away begins.