As humans, we tend to pride ourselves on our ability to think intelligently. We certainly imagine ourselves to be smarter than ants. But, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), large groups of humans are actually worse at some cognitive tasks than large groups of ants.
In the study, researchers posed the same cognitive problem to individual humans, to individual ants, and then to groups of each species. The task involves maneuvering a T-shaped object across a rectangular area divided into three chambers in such a fashion that the obvious route is not possible, and the problem must be solved in a very specific way.
(See the research article for explanations and videos.)
When the problem is posed to individual humans and individual ants, the humans outperform the ants. However, when the same problem is posed to a group of humans who are not able to communicate with each other, and also to a group of ants, human performance deteriorates, and ant performance improves.
“Our results exemplify how simple minds can easily enjoy scalability,” say the study’s authors, “while complex brains require extensive communication to cooperate efficiently.”
When I read this study, of course the first thing I thought of was complex sales. Unlike transactional sales where you generally have one salesperson and one consumer deciding together on a course of action, in complex sales you generally have groups of people on both sides of the equation.
This alone can explain why so many complex sales go stagnant and die. If a group of ants can’t manage it, apparently, neither can we.
But there is one big difference between ants and humans. Ants can’t talk. Humans can.
Unfortunately, sales professionals often think that it is sufficient to talk to one person, and that if they can sort the problem out between them, then the sale will go through. This results in a situation where parties on both sides are failing to communicate among themselves, which makes the group of them literally no smarter than a group of ants.
Might they solve the buyer’s problem? It’s possible. But only by a lot of trial and error and possibly some luck.
One thing the study showed is that humans trying to solve a problem together without communicating with each other are strongly vulnerable to the problems of groupthink. Instead of reasoning out a solution, they will tend to quickly reach consensus around a majority opinion. This is unfortunately very often the wrong opinion, and leads to either not solving the problem, or taking much longer to do so.
On the other hand, when they are communicating, they can reason out the problem more effectively and, although it might take longer to make an initial decision, they are more likely to solve the problem faster.
Salespeople with “happy ears” often reach consensus quickly with one person inside the buying organization. But they often fail to communicate with other people inside the organization, which allows the organization to reach a consensus by groupthink. This is often the wrong choice, and usually ends in “status quo,” which benefits neither organization.
Once they understand this, salespeople can win more deals by using their human capacity for communication to coordinate with more stakeholders. When all of the stakeholders are involved in the conversation with the salesperson, they can make better group decisions.
Of course there is an art and a science to how to go about working with all stakeholders to reach a useful consensus and solve the customer’s problem. But the first step, if we want to be smarter than ants, is to open the communication channels.
Tell me: Are your sales teams smarter than a group of ants?
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn
From north to south, east to west, Membrain has thousands of happy clients all over the world.