The route to an A-class sales team

Identifying who will make a top performing sales person, and how to develop your commercial teams to all perform at this level, is an age-old challenge.

With the costs of getting this wrong higher than for most other roles – above the typical costs of recruiting and training there is also the field-based expenses and customer reputation over the lag-period when the new sales person is getting up to speed, plus the ongoing high costs of running a sales team.

As organizations traditionally evolve from tactical selling to strategic selling the stakes get even higher. With so much to win or loose we need a clear way to select the right sales people for the job.

A study done by Harvard Business Review authors David Mayer and Hertbert Greenberg “What Makes a Good Salesman” found that what distinguished superior A-class sales people from the rest, even above experience, was a particular balance of ego and empathy. The research suggests that A-class sales people need a strong ego to drive them past frustrations and failure onto the next sale, they need to be hungry enough to want to always keep going, and have a keen sense of how success reflects on them personally. But they also need to be highly empathetic to genuinely want to serve their customers in the best way possible, to help their customers achieve their own goals.

Think about this, and you will probably not be able to come up with many people you know that have this delicate balance; being strongly driven to achieve results yet deeply empathetic about others. 

It’s actually a pretty rare mix. The research data suggests only about 14% of people in a sales role actually possess these skill required to be A-class sales people.

As it’s in such short supply then the question is: do you select for empathy and train ego or select for ego and train empathy?

So assuming you have a mixed bag in your sales team, some high in empathy, some high in ego. What can you and can’t you train?

Neuroscience tells us we can literally train the brain to think in new ways. So training is certainly an option.

Let's look at training for a stronger ego: Our natural development process as humans, from birth to old age, is to move towards less egocentric behavior (compare the behavior of most adults to the behavior of a 3 year old when asked to consider the needs of someone else and you will get the essence of what I mean here).  Perhaps this is the natural growth to a fully developed adult, although we all differ on where we started from and where we are on this journey at any one point. Some of us just have a stronger ego drive than others, but the trend is probably that this softens (barring unforeseen events in life) to some degree as we age.

So can we train our high empathy sales people to be more ego-driven?

I’m not sure what that would look like, trying to get people to think more about their own success that that of others, I don’t even know if that would be considered ethical as a training program, and it probably goes against our natural tendency as we age. 

Then the other option is to hire for a results-driven-ego and train for empathy.

So, can we train that?

Well, yes, it seems we can.

What do we really mean by “empathy” in sales people? Having spoken to many sales leaders over the years, this is what they tend to want to see from their high-ego sales people in addition to what they are already doing:

1.    Think more about what the customer wants

2.    Be more of a team player

3.    Have a bit more patience (get less frustrated with minor set backs, internal processes)

4.    Listen more

These skills are eminently trainable, not just as something to remember to do (that almost never works) but we can literally re-wire our own brains to have these as a more default mode way of thinking through practices like mindfulness.

The problem is how these skills are trained; this can be the biggest obstacle. Try telling your selected group of high-ego-driven sales people that you are holding a mindfulness training session to help them be more empathetic and you wont see them for dust.   

Yet this is the place where the change really happens. It’s far from the comfort zone. It’s literally the last thing they want to do...

....and yet probably the most impactful thing they can do.

The challenge then becomes how do you package it up to make it acceptable.

It needs to presented as a skill that leverages something they are interested in. Luckily mindfulness has this already packed into it: the practice itself helps us become more focused and productive.  Branded as “focus and productivity training” it becomes a lot more acceptable. 

Changes happen pretty quickly, with regular practice they will notice their ability to focus improves and in turn they become more effective and productive. But also the more they practice the more they are able to manage petty frustrations, notice when their minds are distracted during conversations and be able to bring their minds back to the present, so they become better listeners.

When our minds are distracted they typically go into a self-referential thinking mode, where we are preoccupied with “me, mine and my world”. This all-about-me thinking style is not conducive to empathy with customers, but with continued practice of mindfulness they will start to notice when they drift into this style of thinking, and develop the ability to move to a more inclusive, empathetic style when needed. The barriers between “them and us” starts to soften slightly. As a result empathy with customers and team members improves.

With this approach of selecting for high ego and training for high empathy you can start to develop an A-class sales team from within, rather than hiring from outside. And it gives a quick way to identify who will most likely be a top performing sales person and who would be better suited in a different type of role.

Sarah Robertson, Potential Project

referenced article: “What Makes a Good Salesman” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 2006, David Mayer and Herbert M. Greenberg