It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in today’s market.

Products/solutions are often quite clearly defined and a salesperson’s ability to negotiate price and value-added services is limited in today’s market.

We are now finding some companies are setting prices for their sales teams with no room for negotiation, thus eliminating price negotiations altogether.

(Not always a bad thing if you ask me, given all the pricing discounts I have seen sales people giving away unnecessarily over the years.)

So what is a sales person to do now?

We are consistently hearing in interviews with high performing sales managers and sales people that the ability to positively influence the client is a more critical competency than the skill of negotiating. This has direct relevance to the emotional intelligence (EI) area of managing others emotions.

The emotional management of others is the skill of influencing the moods and emotions of others. A sales person’s ability to:

• Influence a prospective customer to say ‘yes’.
• Overcome a customer’s reservation towards a new product.
• Help a client feel enthusiastic about a product they recently purchased.
• Plan with a client how to best engage their ‘economic buyer’.

These are critical to success in business today.

In addition, we are finding that:

• Accurately reading the client, gauging their reactions and then adjusting your own style is also being highlighted as a key competency of high performing sales people. This is relevant to the EI competency of recognising emotions of others, emotional reasoning and managing others emotions.
• Building relationships and trust is also critical. For the past three of our major corporate projects in assessing “sales force fitness”, it has been cited as a key point of competitive difference. The ability to build trust-based relationships is influenced by a number of EI competencies – emotional self awareness, emotional awareness of others, ability to influence others’ emotions and emotional control.

Ask yourself: “How effectively are my sales people perceiving, understanding, reasoning with and manage their own and others’ feelings.” These skills are cornerstones to successful selling, as emotions are an inherent part of why people buy and why they do not.

As the New York Stock Exchange is now looking at “employee engagement” as a significant predictor of higher share value and market return, and given we are all competing, not just for clients and market share but for good employee talent, maybe a key performance indicator for sales management could be in Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB).

I came across some recent research into sales management, and it got me thinking about how team leaders were not allowed to “mother” their sales teams.

A loaded term, “mothering”, and without proper definition creates myths and innuendo where none should exist. The following research piece might surprise you - then again it may not.

The research, conducted by Piercy, Lane and Cravens, examines the gender issue across multiple companies from the perspective of sales managers.

What the research found was that, by and large, sales units led by female managers who had higher levels of behaviour control activities displayed higher effectiveness in terms of better job satisfaction and job involvement; lower role ambiguity, job anxiety, and burnout; higher organisational commitment; and with a lower propensity to leave.

Behaviour control activities include monitoring, directing, evaluating and rewarding people. The research says, in part: “Female sales managers perform significantly higher levels of behaviour-based control activities and display higher competence in this management approach, compared to male counterparts.”

Subsequent analyses of the same salesperson study (Piercy, Lane, and Cravens 2002) examined sales manager gender as a predictor of sales team Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB).

The results show that sales teams led by female managers display significantly higher levels of civic virtue, sportsmanship, altruism, courtesy, cheerleading, peacemaking, and overall citizenship. This suggests the management style of female managers (perhaps most particularly, their higher levels of behaviour control activity) encourages and facilitates higher OCB among salespeople working in the sales unit.

While the research showed that both female and male sales managers were able to achieve comparable sales performance, the effect that sales management behaviour control practices (as described above) had on OCB was positively linked to critical factors such as:

• Superior performance with customers
• High sales unit performance
• Helping with work-related problems
• Effective organisational performance
• Higher employee retention

Interestingly the research did not provide support for the “nurturing and caring” stereotype that suggests female managers will lead by supportive and facilitative behaviours, often referred in derogatory terms as “mothering”. However, female sales managers appear to “go the extra mile” in terms of conscientiousness.

It was reported that female sales managers spend more time monitoring, directing, evaluating and rewarding control activities in their sales teams than their male counterparts.

One of the benefits of a behaviour-based approach to sales management control is that sales managers work more closely with sales people and gain a greater understanding of the weaknesses of their salespeople – important areas that need to be improved – and provide strategies on how to help them improve their performance. If that’s mothering, then I’m all for it.

The “gender” discussion highlighted by my Sell like a Woman project, articles and other research leads people to believe that women are doing things men cannot because of gender. And this is causing sighing and forelock tugging in some male circles. “Not another feminist on her soap box” or “all men are useless” I hear some say.

As stated previously, my approach is not to denigrate men or idolise women, but to bring you information and findings that give you food for thought to help you make decisions so that you can be more successful at what you choose to do (as long as you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else in the process, as my mother would say).

So let’s put this gender issue into perspective. We all would be mistaken to assume gender is the single distinguishing factor in anything except pregnancy and childbirth. What we are finding is the research is highlighting that women are bringing certain qualities and skills they use in other aspects of their lives to the world of business and, in particular, sales.

And what we are finding is whatever they are doing is working better than previous initiatives, especially now the landscape of sales is changing so markedly. The qualities these women exhibit are not the exclusive domain of women; they can be and are modeled by men as well. It’s just that this has been done at an unconscious level to date, with little if any recognition by management.

What these women and others like them are showing is that they are using higher levels of “emotional Intelligence” (EI).

Research into competencies of highly effective salespeople have generally identified three or four broad categories; Selling skills, General management or Business skills, Technical skills and Interpersonal skills, and more recently, EI.

Interpersonal skills were historically identified as an important category of competencies needed by highly effective salespeople. Their importance reflects the significant contribution of the salesperson’s ability to form and develop a relationship with their client to creating a profitable and productive relationship for both parties. Emotional intelligence is a psychologically more complex process than Interpersonal skills, involving a deeper process of analysing, reasoning and responding.

Our own research, involving over 300 interviews coupled with research findings from Australia and overseas, has found that superior performing salespeople and managers demonstrate greater use of competencies related to the use of EI. They display well developed self-awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.

A recent Australian study conducted by Genos also found that sales performance and EI are positively related. What was even more exciting was that they showed that EI can be learned and developed in people. (An 18% increase in EI for the managers and sales representatives that participated in the learning and development program).

And furthermore, developing the EI of sales professionals and managers results in greater sales returns. The Australian pharmaceutical company who put their sales managers and sales representatives through an EI sales development program found that the program has so far returned $6 for every $1 invested over a six month period.

These EI qualities are being used by high performers despite current management practices in most cases, however if raised to a conscious level and recognised for the value they bring to people, business, customers etc, then they can be selected in and/or trained and developed in people (men and women alike) to use effectively and purposefully in the workplace (and beyond).

If you are still not convinced consider this:

• “Buyers do not buy products, services, or ideas; they buy states. Buyers buy emotion.” – George Ludwig, former National Sales Director for Johnson & Johnson (USA)
• “Emotions are part of the total communications experience, and they must be acknowledged.” – Janelle Barlow & Dianna Maul, Emotional Value: Creating strong bonds with your customers
• “Partnerships will never work if they are forced. It is important to provide ‘friendly’ service; however, organisations pull the legs out from under ‘friendliness’ by too tightly scripting the experience.” - Janelle Barlow & Dianna Maul, Emotional Value: Creating strong bonds with your customers

If you want further information on EI and sales let me know.

Stop for a minute and reflect: What is your view of selling? Has your perception of sales changed over the years?

Your answer is most likely ‘yes’ if you are a customer or salesperson in business to business (B2B) sales. But not if you are a customer of retail. More about that another time.

Today’s changing B2B and high-end B2C sale practice styles are an adaptation to the environmental forces. The change towards people-centricity is evident in a number of organisational functions, in particular the sales function where there has been a significant shift from product-focused selling to relationship selling.

To serve their customers better, in ever more competitive marketplaces, companies feel compelled to reorganise their sales force around markets rather than products.

Findings from the Sell Like a Woman research project found that companies realise they cannot satisfy every customer and instead focus more on serving well those whose needs and expectations they can meet, in return having kept an ongoing customer and built up a good reputation.

After all, most businesses these days acknowledge that keeping an existing client is easier than acquiring a new one, especially with decreasingly less product differentiation, brand loyalty and information exclusiveness.

The perception of sales is improving within companies because the very nature of sales is transforming; only part of sales is about making a sale.

The position titles serve as good indication. “Sales representative” has changed and diversified into more co-operative titles such as Account Manager, Relationship Manager and Business Development Manager. All sales, but with more of a partnership focus to build their customers’ business.

One of the survey participants, Debra Templar, the director of Australian Retail Services, who has almost two decades of management experience, really hit the note, which resonates acutely with many other successful saleswomen, when she gave her impression of what is it her clients value the most about working with her:

“They trust me,” she said. “(They receive) value for money. They value expertise. They know I can sift through issues and flag situations they perhaps haven’t seen. I keep confidences. And I get results for them. I make them appear heroes to their people.”

This new strategic, multi-tasking approach to sales (of being a mini CEO) is a complex process of being an attuned listener and communicator and a creative problem solver on the customer level, and understanding or inferring customers’ broader business objectives, while having a sound knowledge of one’s own internal resources and abilities more generally. Those are some of the qualities that distinguish the most highly successful salespeople of the 21st century from the average.

Seeing the bigger picture or “playing god” isn’t easy, especially when no one expects that from a salesperson in the first place. Sales managers more often than not discourage any activities not directly related to selling a product right here, right now, to as many people as possible.

However, as Rosenbaum (1999) found, successful salespeople often disregard manager’s directives and achieve results in ways other than following these primitive and, at a first glance, intuitive rules alone.

Last week I explained that my blog is called Sell Like A Woman because there is an increasing body of research overseas showing that woman are often outperforming men in achieving sustainable results in sales and client relationships. And I promised you I would start to highlight, from my research, what successful sales women do especially well. So here is your first snippet.

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.

I asked 50 highly successful sales women across a wide variety of industries about the differences between male and female sales people.

There was a uniform feeling among all the women interviewed for my project that female sales people are better at establishing a long-term relationship with a customer, are better listeners and find it easier to identify emotions and respond with empathy. Here are a couple of quotes from some of the women in the research project.

“I strongly believe that female sales people start from a very different place to our male counterparts. We start with the relationship. Rather than darting in and offering quick fix solutions, we take a longer term and ultimately more strategic view of the potential value of each client to our company.

“We are willing to be more patient in bringing a client on board, if it will generate better results. I think it also fair to say that, from my observations, women do more of the detail/paper/leg work themselves (rather than delegating it to others), are much better time managers, and less caught up in ‘appearances’ – less ego driven. If I were a client, I would rather have a female rep looking after my interests.”

Another had this to say: “Big generalisation: women tend to be better listeners, and men are better at asking for the business. Women are more patient and men are more direct. Women like to build the relationship, when men like to ‘consummate’ the relationship with the sale.”

All of women interviewed responded in unison, believing saleswomen have certain advantages over men. This surprised me, given that up to date, still, a vast majority of salespeople are male, and sales as a profession is still considered a male profession.

The results of my research are consistent with other extensive studies done. Rosenbaum (1999) found that women have a real edge over men when it comes to complex selling, and in particular they surpass men with respect to the following competencies:

• Aligning customer/company strategic objectives.
• Listening beyond product needs.
• Orchestrating organisational resources.
• Consultative problem solving.
• Engaging in self-appraisal and continuous learning.

To help us come to grips with these and other competencies that make for good sales success, I will focus on a specific competency each week in my blog and this will give you the opportunity to explore how you use each competency in your work and sales careers – and how it affects your sales performance. Think about it like fitness training – bit by bit over time.

I welcome your feedback and findings.

Sell Like A Woman is purely about raising the level of consciousness of what qualities really make for great sales people (men and women alike) in the 21st century. So maybe we can begin to help managers clearly identify and articulate what they are looking for.