Why Introverts Make Great Hires in Today's Digital Sales Economy

The introvert may feel that a career in sales is a terrible fit for their reserved personality, but the new #DigitalSales reality needs candidates with these characteristics and skills. The days of the "Boiler Room" and "Good-Ol-Boy" mentality is a thing of the past in today's #Tech dependent contact centers. Jacques Worth stated "The new, far more effective sales paradigm is based on mutual trust, mutual respect, mutual agreements and mutual commitments" and not a one side pushy sales approach.

The following are the most common characteristics of an introvert:

Composure: Most Introverts exude composure and self control, both of which put potential customers at ease

Ability to Listen: Introverts know how important listening to the needs of the customer is to matching those needs with a product of service. Would you prefer to buy technology from a salesperson who carefully listens to your needs, or only talks while you do and pushes their own agenda?

Relationship Building: This is where an introvert shines, they typically have an inherent ability to build relationships. Marti Olsen Laney, author of The Introvert Advantage: How To Thrive In An Extrovert World states "Introverts, actually excel at building long term relationships, so they do a great job at developing and maintaining a reliable customer base and/or territory".

You are now probably starting to see the connection between these introvert characteristics and our ideal #DigitalSales BDR/SDR candidate. Today's most effective digital sales leaders -- are sharing content, answering questions, asking even more questions and identifying a need rather than talking someone into something they do not need or want. The more we act like a peer rather than a vendor the greater the likelihood we will close more business in today's digital economy.

Beyond these ideal employee characteristics, we must also invest time into #SalesEnablement. Identifying and hiring is just the beginning, training and developing these individuals properly is very important and where we drop the ball as managers much too often. The right coaching, the development of a good business acumen and a strong belief in what they sell, gives the introvert an incredible advantage within today's digital sales workforce.

In closing, business owners and hiring managers, if you want to attract and enable these types of candidates within your organization, you may need to make some changes. Introverts do not like noisy work environments. This means your incredibly innovative open floor plan needs to go or change to support these individuals, they are not collaborators and feel that the open floor plan speaks to ongoing distractions and a lack of productivity. A recent study published in Applied Psychology, confirms that collaborative work environments can make your top performers feel miserable and socially isolated. This is due to the fact that these groups more often also contain the mediocre staff and these folks would rather socially isolate the top performer as a threat to their mediocrity than learn from them.

I hope that this article gave you some insight into this unique candidate and also sparks some debate on how we identify and develop our #InsideSales professionals for these important #sales roles. I am confident that there are also as many qualified extrovert top #InsideSales performers out there as well and the more we continue to develop and use #Tech like #PredictiveAnalytics to better identify these characteristics within our candidates the more successful we will be.

Dan Cilley has been providing Digital Sales Technology, Contact Center, Customer Experience (CX) consulting, systems administration and implementation services for over 20 years as the principal consultant and CEO of #TeleMaximum. He is the local South Florida chapter president of the AA-ISP and a advocate for the professional evolution of the inside sales role nationally. He is also a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, he feels that sales is a noble profession and strives to to be awesome every day.