What kind of salesperson are you?

November 17, 2010

By Erica Finley

The Harvard Business Review recently tried to tackle “the trouble with salespeople.” According to the publication, 9% of sales meetings end in a sale, and one out of every 250 salespeople exceed their goals.

But why? Researchers Lynette Ryals and Iain Davies observed 800 sales professionals and came up with some interesting data.

The best of the best salespeople (37%) fell into three categories: experts, closers and consultants. The rest, 63%, were storytellers, focusers, narrators, aggressors and socializers.

Experts, at the top of the food chain (9% of salespeople), are good at seven skills:

Meeting prep
Customer interaction
Company presentation
Presentation and rapport
The sales pitch
Storytelling
Rising to the challenge

According to the Business Review, consultants (15%) “listen well and are good problem solvers; and closers (13%) can pull off big product sales, but their smooth-talking style doesn’t work as well for selling services.”

To read the rest of this fascinating study, check out the infographics on the website.

This post is brought to you by the good folks at Dale Carnegie Training of North Dakota. We would love to connect with you on Facebook and Twitter.

Tags: dale carnegie training of fargo, dale carnegie training of north dakota, harvard business review, sales tips, types of salespeople

This entry was posted on November 17, 2010 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Sales Effectiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Murat Muhurdaroglu

Thank you for this great post. I read the article in HBR and now really curios about so-called 23 sales skills that were observed during the study. I think the below note from HBR blog is one of the key outcomes for us.

“Fixing the Problem with Sales Training:
Ryals and Davies found that a disproportionate amount of training is allocated to presentation and rapport skills, as well as the actual sales pitch. Since everyone gets this training, these skills have been commoditized. Adding training on the key skill of rising to the challenge – that is, overcoming customer objections on the fly, the skill that all three of the “good” salespeople excelled at – would be a smart reallocation of training budgets.”
http://www.rossahall.com/ Ross Hall

I find the various comments on this research fascinating, not least because they tend to link back to the HBR article. Why do I find them interesting?

Because I’ve not been able to find definition of what each of the behaviours means.

So many of the pitches and “wow, you need to apply this” type posts I see are of little value as they do not explain what the behavioural components are that go into making an “expert” or “consultant”.

Interesting …