Marketing for Rainmakers

Did you ever notice how you often do your best work when you’re most under the gun? It seems like the closer the deadline and the more pressure there is to perform at peak ability, the better we do. It’s a trait that is virtually universal among rainmakers, and it now has some scientific basis to explain the whys and wherefores.

“When Losing Leads to Winning” is a just-published study by two Wharton professors, Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. The authors postulate that “through increasing motivation, being slightly behind can actually increase success” and their “analysis of over 6,000 collegiate basketball games illustrates that being slightly behind increases a team’s chance of winning.  Teams behind by a point at halftime, for example, actually win more often than teams ahead by one.”

What’s really cool is that Berger and Pope didn’t limit their analysis to the basketball court. They conducted several lab experiments in which test subjects were given a specific task and told they were competing against an unseen opponent. Halfway through the test the subjects were stopped and told either that they were well behind, slightly behind, tied with, or slightly ahead of their opponent. When they resumed their task, the subjects who believed they were slightly behind displayed significantly greater focus and effort than the other three groups.

Berger and Pope then added another twist to their lab test. In addition to telling subjects how well they were performing against the competition, they examined the impact that “self-efficacy” (known as self-confidence in less academic circles) had on each individual’s performance and effort. The results were unequivocal. Individuals who had higher self-efficacy “were more likely to respond to feedback that they were behind by working harder and exerting more effort.”

Self-efficacy is a hallmark of rainmakers. And while rainmakers never allow the competition to get too far ahead, sometimes allowing the competition to think they are slightly ahead puts them right where you want them.

Phil Fragasso