A few years ago I was asked by my boss to develop software that would be used by the sales people in the company to track the leads they received. The software was very simple – all it did was tell the sales people if a lead had converted into a sale. The software had charts to show the conversion rate over time. The idea was that the sales people had a quick graphical overview of how well they were performing.
The problem was that after I finished the software, none of the sales people wanted to use it. They were already using excel for this, and it worked just fine. The software was a bit better, but nobody wanted to give it its chance.
I was quite disappointed that nobody was using my software, but since it was my job, I continued to work on it. Then one day, I was reading wikipedia and I found a very interesting article on Classical Conditioning. I figured that similar to how Pavlov had conditioned dogs to associate a bell sound with food, I could associate a bell sound with each new sale. Since a sale results in a commision for the salesperson, the bell will be a sound they want to hear. I’ve also read about how companies would put bells in rooms to motivate workers.
Two weeks after I added the feature, the entire salesteam was using the software, purely by word of mouth recommendation. Since then they have rewritten the software 3 or 4 times – but they never changed that bell sound. It’s still the very same one.
interesting post, any scheme how someone can implement this classical conditioning to sell products?
Reminds me of the beep in TweetDeck… Also, when I was a kid, I made my dad’s Lotus spreadsheet macros beep when they were finished. They took a long time to run, this way he could here from the other room when they were finished.