Bury
your old sales stereotypes
Sales is too often seen as a male-driven industry, where aggressive alpha-types rise to the top. But buying into that stereotype when you’re hiring can be detrimental to a team’s performance, especially when you consider the range of communication and relationship-building skills that are required to generate success in a modern sales environment.
JEFF BUTLER Workplace Expert and Author “In the first company I founded, the employees were all male. I’ve never been the type of employer who tried to ‘balance the scales’ by hiring one gender or race over another. I don’t care what a person’s background is, as long as they can perform the task that needs to be done. But when I started my second company, I decided to focus our hiring on people who could connect both over the phone and email, based on particular qualities we discovered that our business development team required. Oddly enough, the company shifted from mainly male, to 90% female. The impact of this was a 200% increase in revenue from our previous year’s Q1—simply by changing the initial point of contact.”
CRISTIAN RENNELLA CEO & Co-Founder of oMelhorTrato.com (financial services company) “Our team was formed by young entrepreneurs under the age of 35, and we decided that we needed to balance our team better by hiring people over 55 years old. Basically, we realized that our service, with some modifications, could also be useful for a market segment of customers 50 years old and above, something that we hadn’t realized at first because nobody in our team was in that segment yet. After building a more age-diverse team, we were able to increase our sales by 24.4%, which represents $14.2 Million USD in increased revenue per year. We did this partly by adding specific products for the elderly—for example, one of our items is the comparison of loans, so we added products that focused on retirees and pensioners. We even enlarged the default text on our website by four points to make it easier for older visitors to read. It seems obvious, but I assure you it is not.”
W O M E N I N S A L E S AWA R D S / E U R O P E / D EC E M B E R 2 0 1 9
25