Sales and the SI Cover Jinx
WMMM #037 - This week I reveal another bias and explain why it occurs and how to deal with it.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter October 7, 2023 10 min read
Performance through Intimidation?
Imagine you lead a small sales team.
Every quarter, you keep score.
You add up the revenue contribution for each person and stack rank your team based on the numbers.
To prevent “low performers” from remaining that way, you have a one-on-one conversation with the rep at the bottom of your list.
You choose to make this a stern conversation explaining the consequences of delivering the lowest numbers in the group.
Now, imagine that you run the numbers to assess whether your “stern talks” have the desired effect.
You discover that your worst performer is rarely the same person twice.
In fact, you find a reliable quarter-over-quarter improvement in the performance of whoever ranked last and received the “stern talk” from you.
You’d be pretty excited, right?
Clearly, your people are responding to you. Your toughness with your people is getting results.
They fear you and deliver results to avoid the consequences.
This story is not so hypothetical.
“Culling” the bottom twenty percent
In the early 2000s, Oracle acquired an application software company with a culture famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) for eliminating the bottom 20% of its sales force every year.
They called it “culling” the low performers.
In the book Thinking Fast and Slow, the author exposes the flaw in this type of thinking.
Stern talks had nothing to do with improvement in sales performance.
Being hard on your people did not make them perform better.
It was something else.
It’s a misconception, a bias, that can affect scientific research, how we evaluate salespeople, and even how we interpret the performance of our favorite athletes.
And, with a tip of the hat to Katy Milkman’s Choiceology podcast, it earns a spot in this week’s edition of Win More, Make More.
Sports Illustrated
Albert Chen is a writer and former Senior Editor at Sports Illustrated Magazine. Albert spent 18 years with SI and is the author of the book “Billion Dollar Fantasy.”
Sports Illustrated (SI) had 20 million readers in its heyday.
Its content drove the conversation about sports in our society.
Before Netflix, podcasts, sports talk radio, and ESPN Streaming, appearing on the weekly cover of SI was a big deal.
The recent decision to place 81-year-old Martha Stewart on the cover of its annual swimsuit edition was front-page news worldwide.
So it’s a big honor to appear on a SI cover, right?
Not everyone is keen on the idea.
Coach Parcells
In 1996, the NE Patriots were on a run to the Super Bowl.
Their coach was the now legendary Bill Parcells.
Bill was a no-nonsense type with a gruff demeanor.
He suffered no fools and was an intimidating presence.
After winning the AFC title game, he phoned his daughter Jill, who worked in SI’s marketing department, and famously said two words to her: “No Cover.”
Why did he do that?
The Patriots were headed to the Super Bowl, so why would Coach Parcells not want his team on the cover of the biggest sports magazine in the world?
The SI Cover Jinx
Legend had it that individuals on teams that appeared on the cover would be subsequently “cursed.”
Their fortunes would fade once the cover was published.
Their shot at winning the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, or the PGA Championship would be doomed.
Andy North
In 1978, Andy North was a 28-year-old golfer who had never won a major tournament when he won the US Open, one of the biggest golf events of the year.
This spectacular accomplishment and his amazing story landed him on the SI cover.
He had seemingly come out of nowhere to win one of golf’s top four tournaments.
And then, he fell back into nowhere after the SI cover feature.
Mr. North failed to win another event on the PGA Tour for seven years.
Not only did he not win a major tournament, he failed to win another tournament of any kind.
Going seven years without winning after winning the US Open is a significant drop-off.
But in 1985, Andy North won the US Open again.
It was only his second major tournament win, but it also was his second US Open title.
That’s an incredible story.
He makes his second SI cover.
Only a few golfers make the cover of SI, so this was a big national story at the time.
But again, Mr. North’s time in the spotlight would be short-lived.
That second win would be the last time he would win any PGA golf tournament.
The SI Cover Jinx had struck Andy North twice.
The SI Cover Jinx Over the Years
1989 produced three memorable examples.
April 24th - Tony Mandarich appears as the “best offensive line prospect ever” in the upcoming NFL Draft. He was widely regarded as a bust after only three years in the league and appeared again on an SI cover with the headline “Incredible Bust.”
May 8th - Jon Peters of Brenham, TX High School had set a national record for a baseball pitcher with a 51-0 career record. The next game after appearing on the SI cover, he lost for the first and only time in his high school career.
June 5th - Los Angeles Laker forward James Worthy appeared with the word SWEEP after going 11-0 in the NBA Playoffs. The Lakers were then “swept” in the 1989 Finals by the Detroit Pistons 4-0.
September 2003 - The Oregon Ducks earned a Cover by going 4-0 to start the season, including an upset of Michigan. They proceeded to lose their next three games, finished 8-5, and lost to Minnesota in the Sun Bowl in the last minute of the game.
March 2016 - The Michigan State Spartans basketball players Denzel Valentine and Bryn Forbes made the cover, kicking off March Madness, the annual NCAA College Basketball tournament to decide the national champion. 15th-seeded Middle Tennessee then upset the 2nd-seeded Spartans in the first round.
March 2019 - Bryce Harper left the Washington Nationals as a free agent and signed with the Philadelphia Phillies, “a team with real World Series hopes.” That season, the Phillies missed the playoffs with a record of 81-81, while the Nationals inexplicably won their first World Series in franchise history.
By the Numbers
In 2002, SI ran its own story on the SI Cover Jinx.
Albert Chen was a part of that effort.
Since there were no digital archives back then, they manually went through all the covers in the history of SI.
The first issue was in 1954.
There were 2,456 Cover subjects.
They found a “jinx rate” of 37.2%
They defined a “jinx” as a game or tournament loss, a decline in performance, or experiencing some form of injury.
913 SI covers experienced some form of misfortune.
Superstitions are pervasive in sports, but this one can be explained through science.
An athlete makes the cover of SI at a point in time when a new level of fame is suddenly coming at them.
It brings stress, pressure, and added expectations.
But that is not the explanation.
Regression to the Mean
Like water seeking its level, performance regresses to the mean with time.
For Andy North, it makes sense.
For Brenham, TX High School pitcher Jon Peters, no streak lasts forever.
But often, the jinx was just that the cover issue coincided with a pinnacle of success with the athletes featured.
The odds were that their next game or match would not be as good as the amazing one that landed them on the SI Cover.
SI captures these teams and athletes at their peak, and they have nowhere to go but down.
One of the explanations for the so-called SI Cover Jinx is related to the mere fact that athletes only manage to land on the Cover after an extraordinary run of success.
And perfect performance cannot last in sports or any other arena of life.
The technical term described here is “regression to the mean.”
The same concept explains why the sales manager, who denigrates that quarter’s lowest-performing salesperson, could expect to see that person’s results reliably improve after the “tough talk.”
Mean Reversion Neglect
Behavioral scientists first identified the bias of “Mean Reversion Neglect” in 1974.
Elizabeth Tipton, Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University, explains how ignoring a mean reversion can be perilous.
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon occurring when we see repeated measures on the same subjects. The measures at two or more points in time are not perfect. They contain a degree of error.
As a result, those people who score very low or very high on the first measure are very likely to have less extreme scores on the second measure.
In other words, they are more likely to regress towards their mean.
So, if we evaluate salespeople based only on their quarterly numbers, some of your top achievers are attributed to their effectiveness. Still, some part is due to elements out of their control. Some things just happened to fall their way. They experienced some “luck.”
Fast-forward to the next quarter, and that same salesperson doesn’t experience as much luck as they did in the prior quarter.
Their behaviors in the role were reasonably consistent with the prior quarter, but certain things beyond their control did not fall their way this time.
So their performance was slightly lower and closer to the mean than it was last quarter.
To be abundantly clear, regression to the mean doesn’t mean average.
Everyone has a performance level without the element of luck.
And those performance levels are challenging to measure and vary by individual.
We are not all the same.
We possess different performance means.
There is also this element of luck - good luck and bad luck.
Depending on the situation, there can be much or little luck.
Why Regression to the Mean Matters
If we are evaluating and selecting people based on this imperfect and “noisy” measure (quarterly numbers), and we are choosing the lowest and highest performers, we have selected based on their “luck.” Whether good luck or bad luck, in those cases, we decided based on extremes (best or worst luck.)
And it is likely to be followed by a less lucky or unlucky performance, which is closer to their true performance.
The SI Cover Jinx and Sales
Sales is a numbers business.
That’s what we love about it.
There is no “Try.”
We either “Do” or “Not Do.”
Regression to the Mean highlights why our successes are not entirely our fault, but neither are our failures.
There is an element of luck.
Being the top sales performer of the quarter is like an athlete making the SI Cover.
We peaked at a moment in time, and what follows is merely a statistical probability.
Selecting and evaluating salespeople is a tricky proposition.
It’s easy to make mistakes.
Mean Reversion Neglect is a psychological bias, which explains why.
Have you ever heard of “The 3 Ts of Sales Performance?”
They are Territory, Timing, and Talent.
“Timing” is similar to “luck” as used in our flawed measurement discussion.
Merely “culling the bottom 20%” may eliminate some low performers.
But it is just as likely to remove some good and great performers who happened to have regressed below their mean due to factors beyond their control.
It is a biased approach, an example of Mean Reversion Neglect.
Evaluating sales behavior, in addition to the numbers, provides a better approach.
Considering the average length of our sales cycles and applying that to our time measure is prudent. Why measure only quarterly numbers if we have 18-month sales cycles?
Taking into account the territory assigned and how well or not the accounts match your ideal customer profile is a thoughtful measure.
Any measure we use includes some true and some random parts.
When looking at top or bottom performers, we should remind ourselves that there is “noise” in our measurements.
Lessons Learned
Sales is a numbers business, and we’d have it no other way.
Denigrating our people is a flawed sales management approach.
Mean Reversion Neglect is a bias that teaches us to be better sales managers.
Reversion to the Mean explains the SI Cover Jinx.
Our successes are not entirely our fault, and neither are our failures.
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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