
Sales Lessons from a 6 year old: It’s all about the cash - ciscoriordan
http://www.quotacrush.com/index.php/2009/10/09/sales-lessons-from-a-6-year-old-its-all-about-the-cash/
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swombat
Ooh, that's a dangerous, dangerous path. It's well known that adding financial
incentives can have all sorts of negative side-effects.

Beyond the obvious "gaming the system" problems, there is the well-known fact
that paying people to do what they should want to do by themselves can have
strong negative effects on motivation. Once the payments stop, his son will
probably feel like he's being wronged because his dad's not paying him to play
football anymore, and turn his back on it. Net result is the opposite of what
he was trying to achieve.

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jacquesm
Exactly. He's conditioning his son to whine about all kinds of stuff so he'll
get money in order to perform.

School grades and so on. I'm really not sure if this is smart. Such tricks
work both ways.

I've sent my son to karate, I never had to 'push' him there (or bribe him) and
if he didn't want to do it any more then that would be fine with me, even
though it is beneficial to him.

There are plenty of choices, and if you can only get your child to do what
should come natural because of a monetary incentive then that will come back
in some way in the future.

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marklarosa
I don't necessarily disagree, but the point was about salespeople - who ARE
motivated by financial incentives and SHOULD be motivated by financial
incentives.

You can criticize my parenting for sure - but I claim to be an expert sales
guy - not an expert parent!

In this talk, Dan says that when you put certain incentives on - you narrow
the focus of thinking. EXACTLY!! You WANT to focus the salespersons thinking
and have them focused on MONEY. Both for themselves and the company.

Salespeople are not like the rest of you. If you want to motivate a salesteam,
you need to re-do all of these tests with only salespeople.

If I was presented with the candle problem, I'd sell the candle and use the
money to buy a dripless candle!

Sales people are NOT NORMAL!! We operate on a different frequency. Sometimes
100% of what we do is based on financial rewards. True - may not work for most
people - and maybe I'm screwing up my son (although I think he is a future
salesguy), but I stand by my position that the right financial rewards drive
sales.

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mojonixon
He is not your employee, he is your son. If he doesn't want to play football,
he shouldn't play football. It is not the obligation of our children to make
us proud. Frankly, this is just fraked up.

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TrevorJ
There's plenty of time later in life to work hard. Having time to truly _play_
is what's at a premium. If a 6 year old's performance on in a sport can make
you _angry_ then maybe it is time to re-evaluate. Sure, I can see the point
about applying yourself 100% to something, but maybe that's not the right
question. The kid isn't really demonstrating that he is unwilling to take
things completely seriously, only that he's not willing to take this _sport_
completely seriously. Kids _don't_ always take things seriously, it's part of
being a child, don't take that away from him.

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allenp
So I wonder what your opinions would be if we replaced "$20" with "1 hr of
video games per night" - do you have the same reactions?

Or, alternatively, what if the kid had a $20 allowance / week, and if he did
something "bad" he would lose some amount of it per occurrence? Would you feel
better about that situation?

~~~
jcl
Psychologically, there is a big, big difference between offering cash and
offering almost anything else.

In "Predictably Irrational", Dan Ariely ran an experiment where people were
asked to perform a certain task, where each person was offered one of three
payments for the task: $5, $0.50, or nothing. The people who were offered more
money worked harder at the task... But the people who were asked to work for
free worked harder than either of the groups that were offered cash.

Then he performed a similar experiment, except he offered candy equivalents:
cheap candy, expensive candy, or nothing. All three groups worked with
approximately the same amount of effort.

Then he performed the same experiment -- offering candy -- except that he told
each participant how much the candy was worth. People worked as hard as if
they had been offered the candy's equivalent in cash.

<http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational>

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javanix
Good business lesson? Maybe.

Good parenting lesson? Hell no.

