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The keys to sales success Modest, conscientious, well-networked people – and great leadership – are your best bets for improving sales performance. Jon Cowell explains why
Breaking news: pre-hire experience does not predict a new hire’s performance. That is the conclusion of a new review of 81 studies on the topic, published by Chad Van Iddekinge and colleagues (Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober 2019). Having reviewed evidence of post-hire performance across 15 of the 23 job families listed by the US Labor Department’s Occupational Information Network, including sales, they concluded: “We discovered a very weak relationship between pre-hire experience and performance, both in training and on the job. We also found zero correlation between work experience with earlier employers and retention.” This may be unwelcome news to those involved in staffing decisions, because experience is typically one of the most important factors in appointments: the same review found that over 80% of job advertisements either require or strongly prefer relevant experience. So, if it has little to no bearing on success and Dialogue Q1 2020
you want to improve sales performance, what else can you do?
Hiring great salespeople
Fortunately, there are clear pointers in other research as to the skills and personality traits which do help predict sales performance. Hiring managers should focus on recruiting people who possess these qualities. One of the key dimensions is emotional intelligence, or EI, as previously discussed by Ben Laker and Rita Trehan in Dialogue (Q2, 2019). They highlighted that “successful salespeople, on the whole, have EI scores significantly higher than average”. There are a number of other personality traits linked to sales success, as sales guru Steve W Martin’s research has shown. Modesty: ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate more customers than they win over. Conscientiousness: top salespeople have a strong