Axis Sales Accelerator
The best salespeople in a digital world aren't the best closers. They're the most curious.
The digitalization of the today’s sales environment has impacted professional sales roles tremendously, and with it, the capabilities that are required for success. The old sales playbook assumed salespeople held an information advantage. They knew the product; the buyer didn’t. Today’s B2B buyers arrive armed with research, comparisons, and a clear sense of their options before ever speaking to a sales rep. Add the emergence of virtual meetings, social selling, and the need to co-create custom solutions with a buyer to differentiate you from global competitors, and it's easy to see that the job has fundamentally changed. The personal traits that made someone a great closer in 2010 no longer guarantee success. Hiring for the old profile is hiring for a world that no longer exists.
This insight comes from a study of senior B2B sales leaders—directors, VPs, and senior VPs—drawn from technology, manufacturing, telecom, medical, and financial services in Canada. Over 21 hours of in-depth interviews were captured, coded, and analyzed, surfacing 203 distinct references to the traits that now distinguish top performers from everyone else.
Three high-level trait types emerged. Two confirm what experienced leaders have long sensed. The third is new - and may be the one your team is missing.
Analytical curiosity — the standout finding. This is a salesperson’s natural drive to research their industry, dig into a customer’s business, ask sharper questions, and synthesize information into insight. Since buyers already have data, value now comes from making sense of it. Curious salespeople probe deeper, uncover hidden opportunities, and become trusted advisors rather than pitch-deliverers. This ability drives better discovery and ultimately better customer solutions. The same trait also fuels disciplined pipeline management—knowing where to spend their time – on which customers, and on which sales activities. This allows them to direct their effort in ways that maximize revenue.
Empathetic citizenship — the ability to quickly build rapport and long-term trust. These salespeople exhibit individual traits such as empathy, emotional intelligence, accountability, genuineness, altruism and exhibit a team orientation. The importance of building rapport and trust in the current selling environment cannot be overstated. First, building rapport in general has become more challenging in a virtual world. Second, solution selling demands trust before a customer will engage. They can really listen to the customer and place themselves in the centre of the customer’s situation to better understand what is needed. That same trait is needed to build relationships across the customer’s entire organization, third party providers, and the seller’s own firm when co-creating custom solutions.
Disciplined drive — the grit to keep going after rejection, plus the discipline to work every stage of the sale, not just the parts a rep enjoys. In addition to grit and discipline, salespeople in this category tend to exhibit resilience, resourcefulness, competitiveness and optimism. Disciplined drive allows salespeople to maintain their motivation. In a world where much selling happens unobserved from a home office, self-discipline and motivation becomes a performance differentiator.
Here’s the catch: few salespeople are equally strong in all three, and that’s exactly the problem to manage. A pure analyst may struggle to build rapport. A natural connector may chase the wrong accounts because they skipped the analysis. The over-analyzer gets stuck “in the weeds” and never moves the deal forward.
The magic is in the combinations. Curiosity plus empathy produces a credible expert who shares what they learn. Curiosity plus drive focuses energy on the highest-value opportunities. Empathy plus drive creates genuine ownership and accountability.
In digital selling, information is a commodity—what’s scarce is the salesperson who can be curious, caring, and relentless all at once. Stop hiring closers and start hiring someone who digs deeper, builds trust, and never lets go.
