How Can You Predict Success in Sales? The Holy Grail of Sales Recruitment and Management

By: Laurie Hall
What are the key personality traits that salespeople really need to be successful? Ask any sales manager and you’ll get a confusing array of answers to this question. You’ll hear phrases like ‘driven to succeed’, ‘good at closing’, ‘tough negotiator’, ‘great listener’, ‘resilient’, ‘activity planning’, ‘rapport builder’ and ‘people person’.

But can one person possibly have all of these ‘traits’, since some of them are almost opposites? And if we can’t have them all, which ones are most important – which can’t we do without?

And what is personality anyway? The phrases above may look great on a job description, but some of them have little to do with personality. They’re learned skills. In theory, anyone can learn and use great sales skills, regardless of their personality. So where does that leave us?

Wouldn’t it be more useful to know which aspects of personality are connected with the willingness and ability to learn and use great sales skills? Then we would kill all the birds with one stone, so to speak.

These questions are not as difficult to answer as you might think. Last year, I carried out a small study, using a well-known psychometric test, hoping to find some clues. I got more than I bargained for. I was expecting vague and inconclusive results, open to interpretation. Instead, I got strong, statistically reliable correlations. The results were startling. They indicated significant correlations between sales performance in that organisation and four personality traits. Just four.

‘So what?’ you might ask. Any psychometric company worth its salt can tell you which personality traits are correlated with success in sales. Yes – but this is based on a ‘norm group’ of people working in all kinds of sales roles. What about the sales roles in your business, selling your product, to your customers? No-one can tell you, reliably, which traits are important there.

This may sound pedantic but it’s actually pretty important. There is a great deal of research out there which identifies personality traits that are linked to success in ’sales roles’. But unlike some other roles, sales roles vary enormously. Each sales organisation operates in an environment that is unique in terms of product complexity, sales cycle length, average order value, customer type, organisational culture and so on.

Consequently, the key ’success traits’ in one sales role may be completely irrelevant in another sales role. Anecdotally, this is borne out by the sales manager who has hired a salesperson with a ‘proven track record’ in sales, only to find that they fail in their new role.

Sales managers know that you need a different ‘type’ of salesperson to work on the big deals than the small deals. This is self-evident if you imagine the cliched double-glazing salesman trying to sell a multi-million pound aeroplane to an international airline. They’re both sales roles, but they couldn’t be more different. The ’stereotypical’ salesperson will only be successful in ’stereotypical’ sales roles, which don’t really exist anyway.

Most modern sales roles and most modern salespeople are not stereotypical. Consequently, in your business, success could be dependent on a few, perhaps unexpected, personality traits. The typical, bubbly, outgoing, enthusiastic salesperson may interview well and talk a good game, but have they got what it takes to succeed long-term in a modern sales role? According to my study, the answer is: probably not.

So if there is no such thing as a ‘typical salesperson’, no such thing as a ‘typical sales role’ and we can’t rely on our notion of the ‘ideal salesperson’, where does this leave us?

We need an objective way of predicting what personality traits will lead to success in a sales role. But not any sales role. The sales role in your business.

My study establishes a simple model for doing this. It may have been a relatively small study, but the results were significant enough to prick up the ears of a well-known psychometric testing organisation who asked to use the data to further prove the validity of their flagship psychometric tool. The results were compelling enough that the financial services organisation in which I conducted the study has already changed the criteria for its recruitment. They now recruit a breed of salesperson that is quite different to what most people intuitively felt was ‘right for this business’.

So, it’s possible to create a model that identifies objectively which personality traits contribute to success in a particular role. But why bother?

Personality testing is an objective way of assessing a candidate’s suitability for a role. But like any tool, it is only as good as the user. In order to test personality traits objectively, one must first identify objectively which traits will lead to better performance – which traits are we looking for? Unfortunately, the way in which we do this, in most organisations, is rather subjective. After long discussion and debate, we basically ‘guess’ which traits are important, based on our subjective opinions. Therefore, even though the psychometric tool is very objective, we use it in a subjective way, removing its value as an objective assessment.

Sometimes we kid ourselves that just because we’ve worked in sales for years we have developed some kind of ’sixth sense’ which allows us to know intuitively who will be successful in our sales organisation and who won’t. We’ll cite all the successful salespeople we’ve hired – and conveniently forget about the other half who ‘didn’t work out’. We can come up with all kinds of good reasons for this, but a bad hire is a bad hire. And how many people have you decided not to hire because you didn’t ‘hit it off’ in the interview? Think of all those lost opportunities…

No system is perfect, and clearly psychometrics can never be a cure-all for the minefield that is sales recruitment. You’ll always need interviews, role plays and CVs. But if we use psychometrics better, we only need to interview the people whose personality already predicts a good a fit for selling in our business.

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