What Drives Salesperson Performance? Well, that Depends…

The Shift in What Drives Sales Performance

What drives salesperson performance?  A seemingly straightforward question that is anything but. With over 100 years of research, sales scholars can still explain only 32% of what separates top salespeople from the rest.  So, what’s the problem? Well, for one, professional selling continues to evolve, and with it, the predictors of sales success. A decade ago, salespeople distinguished themselves by serving as superior brokers of product information for their clients. Today, customers have access to as much information as those that sell to them – forcing sales teams to reconsider the value they offer during the selling process. Part of that new value comes from co-creating solutions to customer problems. As a result, salespeople are having to quarterback a collection of stakeholders from inside their own organization, the client’s organization and additional third-party providers. The need for this interorganizational competency extends the one-on-one interpersonal skills traditionally expected of salespeople.  

Secondly, the information used to assess performance has evolved. Longer sales cycles that cross accounting periods have reduced the importance of accounting data in performance measurement. Instead, CRM output, customer survey data, and supervisory observations have become new sources of data for performance evaluation and offer richer information to support supervisory coaching discussions with team members.

The pace of change in the trends above is highly context-dependent, limiting science’s ability to offer a universal silver bullet for improving performance.

The Study

Given the complexities described above, a study was conducted to statistically synthesize all published academic research on sales performance from the most recent decade. We used a statistical methodology, referred to as meta-analysis, which became extremely popular in the 1980s among the medical science community, as it allowed multiple studies exploring the outcome associated with the same medical intervention to be statistically combined, resulting in a larger overall sample size and greater research precision.  

For our study, we identified 150 research papers from the past decade linking a total of 300 variables to salesperson performance. Each individual research finding in our 150 papers became a single data point in our meta-analysis dataset, ultimately generating 977 data points for analysis.  In addition, we consolidated each of the 300 variables into 1 of 19 umbrella predictor categories. For example, the variables customer knowledge, competitive knowledge, and industry knowledge were all assigned to the sales-related knowledge predictor category.

The Three Tiers of Sales Success

Upon completing our analysis, we found something quite interesting.  The 19 predictor categories of sales performance could be broken down into three broad tiers: 1) Universal predictors of sales performance. These factors are important to selling success in all sales environments; 2) Context-specific predictors of performance.  These factors are more important in some selling situations and less so in others; and 3) Necessary but insufficient predictors of performance. Simply put, these factors are table stakes. They do not help distinguish between high and average performers; however, their absence negatively impacts performance.

• Universal predictors. Task-specific self-efficacy, interpersonal skills, personal traits (empathy, emotional intelligence, resilience, coachability), work-related social support, adaptiveness, sales process-related skills (qualification, presentation, etc.)
• Context-specific predictors. Interorganizational skills, technology adoption and social media skills, sales-related knowledge, and non-strategic behaviours (time management, moral judgement, and the ability to “fail fast”)
• Necessary but insufficient predictors. Strategic behaviours (customer orientation, solution, consultative communication, etc.), goal orientation, work engagement (job satisfaction, organizational commitment), effort, and reduced levels of psychological demand (role ambiguity, role overload, and role conflict)

Why Context is Important

Those factors that are particularly sensitive to the selling context appear highly aligned to the level of product complexity within a sales environment. Longer sales cycles and greater customization increase the need for interorganizational skills, and a greater level of sales-related knowledge compared with more transactional selling environments.  In addition, the sales cycle length and overall deal value associated with the sale of customized solutions require salespeople to effectively manage the time they allocate to each customer and selling activity, and to quickly recognize deals they are unlikely to win (i.e., fail fast) so they can redirect their efforts elsewhere.

What Sales Leaders Should Do

1. Hire universal traits first. Screen for empathy, emotional intelligence, and resilience. These traits are not easily developed through training or coaching and therefore need to be recruited for. General rule of thumb-skills can be developed, personal traits can’t.
2. Match context-specific skills to the role. No organization can find, hire, develop and retain an entire team of superstars, which means you need to deliver extraordinary results with an average team. Be clear about those capabilities that should take priority during hiring in your particular sales environment. Hire for those and redesign your sales roles to reduce the importance of others. Trying to hire for all skills simultaneously will result in mediocre recruiting.
3. Invest in your internal environment. Sales can be a lonely job.  Build well-established social support systems for your team members to maintain their motivation and commitment. Your internal environment isn’t a backdrop—it’s a lever.
4. Measure on multiple dimensions. A single number can’t capture a multidimensional job. What you measure shapes what you learn. Establish performance objectives that are clear, unambiguous and do not conflict with one another. For example, organizations often force salespeople to trade off what’s right for the customer and company revenue targets. Finally – don’t be afraid to mix objective and subjective measures of performance.
5. Training is an investment; make sure it's delivering a return. Training workshops frequently ask their students whether they understand the concepts being taught and whether they were satisfied with the training and the instructor. Rarely do they ever ask if salespeople now believe they can complete the task they were trained on successfully. Our data suggests this is the most powerful driver of performance. Importantly, we are not talking about general self-confidence – a personal trait largely unaffected by management actions. Instead, we are talking about the belief in one’s ability to complete a specific selling task. This can be fostered through one-on-one coaching activities, as is done with athletes.

Bottom Line

There is no universal blueprint for the perfect salesperson - and chasing one is the real mistake. The best sales leaders build on the few competencies that win everywhere with those that are critical to their specific sales environment.