Why the emerging sales talent is coming from the developing economies of Asia

In Malcolm Gladwell's seminal work on the origins of success, Outliers, he proposes that in each case, the successful people have early opportunities to gain an enormous amount of experience. Bill Gates had access to a computer terminal while in middle school at a time when only large schools and corporations had computers. The Beatles were hired to play nearly non-stop in Hamburg nightclubs before they started seeing success as a recording act. By that time they had refined their act and new the songs that audiences most liked; and that were therefore most likely to produce recording and radio airplay success. In addition to receiving an opportunity to gain experience, Gladwell proposes that a successful person also benefits from her or his cultural legacy.

Gladwell contrasts the legacies of Asian cultures that center on the year-round intensive farming of rice with Western cultures that centre on farming less intensive crops. Asian cultures prize hard work more, he claims, and this legacy is partly demonstrated in the longer school years they have for their children. He also describes a New York City school that transplants this Asian model of schooling into an economically poor neighborhood and sees enhanced academic results.

What we are seeing at this juncture in the history of business to business selling is the emergence of superior sales talent in Asia. To a large extent, along similar lines to Gladwell, we believe there are a number of key factors contributing to this sales capability phenomenon.

First up, in the developing powerhouse economies of Asia, a significantly higher percentage of salespeople are Bachelor Degree educated and have expressly chosen sales as a career; whereas in the western world, sales is much more often a career that the salesperson has ended up in as a result of less defined career decisions and events. In many cases in the more developed economies, sales careers are more often akin to being what we think is best described as an accident.

Secondly and following logically from the first point, because sales is a deliberate career decision, Asia-based sales staff are highly focused on learning technique, as they would in any other profession; be it accounting, marketing, teaching or any other professional discipline. This thirst for learning the science of selling and applying those principles through the execution of sophisticated selling techniques is highly evident when we contrast the attitude and engagement of sales training and coaching participants in Australia and the U.S. versus Asia. The Asian sales teams arrive hungry to learn. They "bail us up" and we end up working through the planned breaks because they have a genuine passion to learn more, wheras the Anglo audiences come to training to "get through the day" and "take one thing away".

Third is the capacity for hard work. Whilst the best sales personnel universally work both hard and smart, one thing that has not changed (like it or not!) is that all of the studies still demonstrate that in sales there is a threshold of minimum activity (e.g. prospecting, calls, meetings) that predicts success. Our experience is that the Asia-based sales staff hit the "success-defining" activity thresholds earlier in monthly or quarterly sales periods and with more regularity. These superior activity levels, in turn, have a compounding effect because more activity sees Asia born and bred salespeople reach Gladwell's magic "10,000 hours" much faster than sales staff in more established sales cultures around the world.

Finally and perhaps more open to debate, we believe the more humble origins of sales staff in the developing economies of Asia produce superior levels of innate motivation to utilise the relatively boundless income opportunities presented by sales roles, to deliver them and their families financial and lifestyle success.

Whether this established trend results in the net migration of Asian sales rainmakers to Europe, the U.K., U.S. or Australasia remains to be seen; should that be the case, the additional significant professional advantage of multiple language capability will come into play. Nevertheless, the smart minds looking for sales talent are already looking at gaining competitive advantage through the sourcing of the elite sales talent emerging from Asia.