Selling for Introverts

The better half of salesmanship

“He’s so gregarious. He’d make a great salesman.” It conjures up the positive, outgoing personality who always gets the order.

Is that actually the reality?

I’ve managed a lot of sales people. The ones who put runs on the board – that’s runs plural, not just the odd flashy win – often have a touch of reserve. They would place in a popularity contest, but not win it.

Extroverted sales executives often feel underappreciated. Sometimes they threaten to move to the opposition. I freaked out the first time that occurred in my firm. What would happen to relationships with the key clients? How would the rest of team react? What would the market think? 

Yet, three months later, the business was still ticking over quite nicely.

What happened?

It was partly our response. We targeted his clients. I didn’t have a look-alike extrovert to cover them, but I did have people whose strength was service. The clients responded with orders. As it turned out, service trumped long lunches. When I asked about it, they said they had a relationship with our firm, not just with one person.

It was a good lesson to learn early. Whenever I faced the same situation again the result was always much the same. 

There are extroverts out there who are well rounded, capable of real humility and possess the skills to consistently achieve great sales. It’s just that they’re rare. Their more introverted opposites can perform equally well, if not better. Good people are often a mix of the two styles.

What are the things that ultimately matter?

Whether you are a looking to build a sales team or sales career, there are two attributes behind long-term success. Both require humility.

First, is having a total view of the customer’s needs. One of the best sales people I knew was a master of this. She was a stockbroker. Our clients were fund managers and you would expect to generate orders by giving good advice. That’s correct. We usually did. But that’s what everyone did. 

What this particular broker deeply understood was that her clients had other needs as well. They had to manage their career; they had to impress their own superiors; they had to raise money in the marketplace; they had to launch new funds; they had to grow their business.

Her service became enmeshed in her client’s achievement of those goals. She may not have been the most popular broker, and she was no extrovert, but for her core clients, she was indispensable. Her relationships would survive takeovers and mergers across our client base. Radical changes in the customer’s strategy would not faze her. Instead they were new opportunities to support her clients in uncertain times. No wonder they stayed with her.

The second ingredient made this possible. She actually cared about those people. She didn’t have to write down the names of their children. She just knew them.

Keep it balanced

Such qualities are not always found among the extroverted, who can trade off speed in closing for depth of relationship. Research shows introverts to be more stable and focused. They process information more deeply and, according to Susan Cain, an author of a book on the subject, they tend to notice subtleties that others miss – including shifts in mood.

Those are things that underwrite resilient relationships, whether in sales or in life. Successful strategies avoid loading up with pizzazz at the expense of real, grounded people. Sustained performance needs to rest on a balanced platform.

To read my review of Susan Cain's book, Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking, click here.