Knowing Yourself

Although there is much dogma and supposedly common-sense knowledge floating around about what makes a good seller, the actual answer to the question is predictably more nuanced than the dogma, and also, at odds with much of the dogma. As with many things in life, what we can measure, or observe on the surface, is often emphasized as more important than what we cannot. What seems certain is that, regardless of how monolithic evaluators, managers, and interviewers are when they measure sellers, there are different personalities and skill sets that are capable of making a good seller, and therefore knowing yourself and the type of seller you are is of paramount importance. Knowing yourself helps you lean into certain behaviors that are beneficial in the sales process, and also helps you decide which skills and behavior sets to work on developing in order to compliment your natural personality and

capabilities.

---

Let’s start with our old friend Daniel Pink, who I have referenced before in my posts. He is a New York Times Best Selling author, who is well known on the “sales conference speaker circuit” for a few things, but among them are his thoughts on personality and how it affects a seller’s success. He talks a lot about the importance of the traits of attunement (perceptiveness), buoyancy (resilience), and clarity (message conveyance), his ABCs of selling, but he also references quite a bit of research on how introverts and extroverts perform as sellers. After multiple studies, and much research, Pink tells us that there is no evidence that being extroverted correlates with more sales.

He starts from the somewhat prevalent assumption that in order to be a good seller, one must be extroverted, but he asserts that there is virtually no evidence that being extroverted correlates with more sales, which is potentially counter to prevailing opinions. He goes on to talk about the research and states that being introverted also does not correlate with more sales, which is likely very in line with expectations. Rather it is the people in the middle, the ambiverts, that are disproportionately the highest performers in sales.

In other words, experts, interviewers, and evaluators tend to look for bigger and more extroverted personalities who they feel can control a room and excel at social relationship building, perhaps simply because that is a noticeable and observable trait that one can base a decision on, but in reality, that noticeable trait does not seem to have any correlation with actual sales success, according to Pink. This does not mean that extroverts cannot be good sellers, it simply means that if we only look for extroverts, we miss out on all the others who may be just as good, if not better.

This is important to understand because while we are not really able to create a perfectly scientifically testable scenario to measure sales skills, we have an experience based understanding that supports the idea that those with a good social presence and perceptiveness tend to do well at developing relationships. It is important to rely on our intuition here and recognize that the research that Pink references is important in establishing this, but even if we didn’t have the research, we shouldn’t disregard our experiential knowledge. Shared experience has tended to be devalued as we have developed more capabilities in collecting and analyzing data, but that can lead to an overreliance on data that does not complete the picture. There are still things that can’t be measured and further, there are things that can’t be fully understood even by the measurement we can do.

None of this is to say that developing behaviors, and learning skills is not important and cannot improve a seller. But it is to say that it seems as though there are many different behaviors and skill sets that can work, and the key is to find ones that fit with your personality.

So, if extroversion does not lead to more sales, and introversion does not lead to more sales, what personality traits do make a good seller? Is it possible that the only positive correlation between sales success and traits is social awareness, social skills, and perceptiveness? Again, very hard to measure, but some of the data and experiential observations that we do have tend to agree with this theory. Of course, we should not forget to mention that hard work and resilience are incredibly important because, while being a passable seller may rely heavily on social skills, long term commitment to improvement and hard work are important for the best sellers.

But we should also be aware that confidence, not necessarily extrovertedness, does play a role in success inasmuch as it contributes to social comfort and cohesion with buyers. Some skills directly contribute to success, and some skills, experience, and attributes, contribute to the feeling of confidence that allows a seller to feel comfortable in sales settings, which puts their buyers at ease, and optimizes social connections between buyer and seller.

Let’s stick with Daniel Pink here for a little while as we explore some of the traits that make a good seller. Pink likes to refer to it as his ABCs of selling, and they are Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Attunement is the idea that the more perceptive and aware you are of your social environment and the needs of your buyer, the better off you will be. Buoyancy is the idea that there is a lot of rejection in sales, so resilience and hard work are important, and Clarity is the idea that we, as sellers, are no longer in the persuasion business, so instead of conveying information, our job has become to clarify points of view and illuminate what is important.

These traits make a lot of sense, and they contribute to the understanding around why natural born traits like extrovertedness don’t explain variation in performance. Certainly magnanimous people who get along well with others are good in social settings, but magnanimity, and social acuity are not specific traits, they are a combination of traits and developed skill that have led an individual to be better at social interactions on the whole. More importantly, many components of that magnanimity are learned; we don’t have to be born with them.

So, on the whole, the lesson here might be that we are looking for the wrong types of people when we evaluate sellers (hint to sales managers: stop over indexing towards extroverts in your searches); this brings up further questions for us sellers; namely, what makes me good at my job, what skills should I develop, and what kind of seller am I anyway?

---

Let’s use the model laid out for us by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in “The Challenger Sale” to start to attack this problem. I think the way in which they define sellers makes a lot of sense and is helpful in understanding ourselves at an individual level. Keep in mind that very few sellers are one of these classifications exclusively, as you read through the definitions that I have paraphrased from Dixon and Adamson. A few people may feel that they represent three, four or even all five of the classifications, but most people will over index pretty heavily on the activities and behaviors of either one or two of the classifications, and for the ones who fall in two categories, one of the categories will likely overshadow the other, at least to a certain extent.

1. The Relationship Builder: This classification of seller is your typical consultative seller, who places a premium on building the relationship and making sure that the client likes them. They are consistently available and focus on the social relationship to the point where they sometimes neglect what is the most commercially advantageous for them and their company.

   
   

2. The Reactive Problem Solver: This classification of sellers focuses on reaction and follow up. They are focused on details and responses, and make sure to be hyper aware of client inquiries and needs so that they can directly respond and follow up.

   
   

3. The Hard Worker: This classification of seller works hard and loves personal development, they focus on volume, meaning they make more calls, send more emails, and book more meetings than others. They rely on this volume to drive results.

   
   

4. The Lone Wolf: This classification of seller is self assured and relies on instinct. They are hard to manage and not interested in internal processes. They rely on their personality and their talent to drive revenue.

   
   

5. The Challenger: This classification of seller builds their success based on a deep understanding of client, product, competitors, and industry. They learn the prevailing worldview, look for commercially viable ways to contradict it, and then challenge their customers, while teaching new approaches.

   
   

The book series is called, “The Challenger…”, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine for those of you who have not read the books to assume that the top performers are the challengers. In fact, top performers measured were more than twice as likely to primarily use the challenger approach compared to any other approach. And, importantly, as deal complexity increased, the positive effects of the challenger approach increased. This is true, however, it is of note to mention that the other four classifications perform similarly. So, while challengers do over index as top performers, there are top performers in all categories, and the other classification perform relatively similarly to each other with the caveat that the relationship builders are the worst performers.

It is important to remember that most sellers fall into multiple categories and that many sellers fall into more than two categories. Further, it is important to remember that sellers that tend towards other profiles besides challenger can also find success. None of that is to disregard the higher performance level of challengers compared to others. Based on their research, it seems logical that developing challenger seller skills is likely to improve performance, but this is not a one dimensional activity. Each individual seller must first understand what type of seller they are, what type of behaviors they currently exhibit, and then start to understand how to develop behaviors and skills within the parameters of their personality.

It is incredibly important to understand and evaluate yourself, as a seller, before deciding what skills and behaviors to try to develop. As sellers try to learn and incorporate new behaviors and skills into their approach, they often lose touch with the basic social skills that led to successful social and sales interactions in the first place. Managers get this wrong all the time too. Many sales managers try to teach sellers the behaviors that worked for them when they were selling, but the issue is that the personality and the setting is different. Times change and buyers react to information and messages differently over time, as we discussed above when talking about outdated sales tricks, and tactics. More importantly, each individual has a different personality and relying on behaviors that are not congruent with one’s personality will come across as phony, or awkward, and nothing pushes a buyer away from a relationship faster than awkwardness and phoniness. When humans sense anything inauthentic, they immediately lose trust and your buyers are no different.

For all of the above reasons it takes careful consideration to really evaluate yourself and think about how to develop behaviors and skills. For example, if you believe yourself to be mostly a “Reactive Problem Solver” with some “Challenger” behaviors, you may want to work on developing the traits of a Challenger, but you may want to make changes to the way you solve problems so that instead of providing answers, you are listening to the problems, learning, and then teaching and reframing in ways that are commercially viable. Or, if you see yourself as mostly a “Relationship Builder”, with some “Hard Worker” traits, you may want to think about how you pivot your relationship building behaviors from being more submissive to more direct. You may also want to double down on your hard work traits so that you have more of a pipeline and therefore less reliance on your current relationships. The point is that there is more than one way to develop yourself as a seller, but the foundation of your development comes from knowing yourself, your personality, your behaviors, and your skills.

Know yourself in order to know you best development path