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More than 35 years ago, the insurance manufacture embarked on an intensive program to solve the problem of plush, wasteful turnover amidst its agents. Estimates at that time indicated that there was a turnover of better than fifty% within the kickoff year and well-nigh fourscore% inside the first three years. After the expenditure of millions of dollars and 35 years of inquiry, the turnover in the insurance industry remains approximately 50% inside the first yr and lxxx% within the start three years.

What is the cost of this turnover? Almost incalculable. Consider:

  • the substantial sums paid new salesmen as salary, draw on commission, expense accounts, so on, which are wasted when those salesmen neglect to sell;
  • the staggering company costs, in time, coin, and free energy, of recruiting, selecting, training, and supervising men who inherently practise not have the ability to succeed; and
  • the vast costs acquired by lost sales, drop-outs, reduced company reputation, poor morale, permanently burned territory, and the like.

What accounts for this expensive inefficiency? Basically this: Companies have simply not known what makes ane human able to sell and some other not. Equally Robert Due north. McMurry has observed:

A very high proportion of those engaged in selling cannot sell….If American sales efficiency is to be maximized and the appalling waste of money and manpower which exists today is to be minimized, a constructive analysis must be made of what selling really is and how its effectiveness tin can exist enhanced….We must look a practiced deal farther—into the mysteries of personality and psychology—if nosotros want existent answers.i

It was the obvious demand for a better method of sales selection that led us to embark on seven years of field inquiry in this expanse. The commodity that follows is based on the insights we gained as to the basic characteristics necessary for a salesman to exist able to sell successfully. Confirming the fact that we are on the right track is the predictive power of the selection instrument (bombardment of tests) that nosotros developed out of the aforementioned research; come across the exhibit "How Well an Instrument Measuring Empathy and Ego Drive Predicted Sales Success."

How Well an Instrument Measuring Empathy and Ego Drive Predicted Sales Success

Ii Essentials

Our bones theory is that a proficient salesman must have at least two basic qualities: empathy and ego drive.

Ability to feel.

Empathy, the of import central ability to feel every bit the other young man does in order to be able to sell him a product or service, must be possessed in large measure. Having empathy does not necessarily mean beingness sympathetic. I tin know what the other fellow feels without like-minded with that feeling. Simply a salesman simply cannot sell well without the invaluable and irreplaceable ability to get a powerful feedback from the client through empathy.

A parallel might be drawn in this connection between the former antiaircraft weapons and the new rut-attracted missiles. With the quondam type of ballistic weapon, the gunner would take aim at an airplane, correcting as best he could for windage and driftage, and so fire. If the shell missed past merely a few inches because of a slight fault in adding or because the plane took evasive activeness, the miss might just every bit well take been by hundreds of yards for all the good it did.

This is the salesman with poor empathy. He aims at the target every bit best he can and proceeds forth his sales rails; but if his target—the customer—fails to perform as predicted, the sale is missed.

On the other hand, the new missiles, if they are anywhere near the target, become attracted to the oestrus of the target's engine, and regardless of its evasive activeness, they finally home in and hitting their mark.

This is the salesman with good empathy. He senses the reactions of the customer and is able to conform to these reactions. He is not simply bound by a prepared sales track, but he functions in terms of the existent interaction betwixt himself and the customer. Sensing what the customer is feeling, he is able to change step, double back on his rail, and make whatever artistic modifications might be necessary to abode in on the target and close the sale.

Need to conquer.

The second of the basic qualities absolutely needed by a practiced salesman is a particular kind of ego drive that makes him want and need to brand the sale in a personal or ego way, non only for the coin to be gained. His feeling must exist that he has to make the sale; the client is there to assist him fulfill his personal need. In effect, to the meridian salesman, the sale—the conquest—provides a powerful ways of enhancing his ego. His self-motion picture improves dramatically by virtue of conquest and diminishes with failure.

Because of the nature of all selling, the salesman will fail to sell more oft than he will succeed. Thus, since failure tends to diminish his self-picture, his ego cannot be then weak that the poor self-film continues for likewise long a time. Rather, the failure must act equally a trigger—as a motivation toward greater efforts—that with success volition bring the ego enhancement he seeks. A subtle balance must be found between (a) an ego partially weakened in precisely the right way to need a cracking deal of enhancement (the auction) and (b) an ego sufficiently strong to be motivated by failure but not to be shattered past it.

The salesman'south empathy, coupled with his intense ego drive, enables him to habitation in on the target effectively and make the sale. He has the drive, the need to make the auction, and his empathy gives him the connecting tool with which to do information technology.

Synergistic Effects

In this give-and-take of the relationship of empathy and ego drive to successful selling, nosotros will treat these dynamic factors as separate characteristics. Indeed, they are separate in that someone can have a cracking deal of empathy and any level of ego bulldoze—extremely potent to extremely weak. Someone with poor empathy can too have whatsoever level of ego drive. Nonetheless, as determinants of sales ability, empathy and ego drive act on and, in fact, reinforce each other.

The person with strong ego drive has maximum motivation to fully utilize any empathy he possesses. Needing the sale, he is not probable to let his empathy spill over and go sympathy. His ego need for the conquest is non likely to allow him to side with the customer; instead, information technology spurs him on to use his cognition of the customer fully to make the sale.

On the other mitt, the person with little or no ego drive is hardly likely to use his empathy in a persuasive mode. He understands people and may know perfectly well what things he might say to shut the sale effectively, but his understanding is apt to become sympathy. If he does non need the conquest, his very knowledge of the existent needs of the potential client may tell him that the customer in fact should not purchase. Since he does not need the sale in an inner personal sense, he so may not persuade the customer to buy. So nosotros frequently say in our evaluations of potential salesmen, "This man has fine empathy, only he is not likely to utilise information technology persuasively—he will not utilise it to close."

Thus, there is a dynamic relationship between empathy and ego drive. It takes a combination of the ii, each working to reinforce the other—each enabling the other to be fully utilized—to make the successful salesman.

Demand for balance.

It calls for a very special, counterbalanced ego to demand the sale intensely and yet allow the salesman to look closely at the client and fully do good from an empathic perception of the customer's reactions and needs.

Thus, there are a number of possible permutations of empathy and drive. A homo may have a high degree of both empathy and drive (ED), or fiddling of either (ed), or two kinds of combinations in betwixt (Ed and eD). For case:

ED—A salesman who has a great deal of both empathy and strong inner sales drive will be at or near the top of the sales force.

Ed—A salesman with fine empathy simply besides little bulldoze may exist a first-class person but will be unable to close his deals effectively. This is the "nice guy." Everyone likes him, and from all appearances he should turn out to exist one of the all-time men on the force. He somehow "doesn't arrive." People finish up liking him only buying from the company downward the street. He is ofttimes hired because he does have such fine personal qualities. Yet his closing ability is weak. He will go along with the client, understand him, and bring him about the close; merely he does not have that inner hunger to move the customer that last one pes to the actual sale. Information technology is this last element of the sale—the close—that empathy lone cannot accomplish and where the assertive quality of ego bulldoze becomes the all-important essential.

eD—A salesman with much drive but likewise picayune empathy will bulldoze his mode through to some sales, but he will miss a bully many and will injure his employer through his lack of understanding of people.

ed—A salesman without much empathy or drive should not really be a salesman, although a great many nowadays salesmen fall into this group. An employer would avert much grief by finding this out in advance, before and so much try is spent in trying to hire, train, and spoon-feed a man who does not have within him the basic dynamics to be successful.

Failure of Tests

Since the selection of top salesmen is potentially of such enormous value, why, it might be asked, has there been so little success to date in developing methods to preselect finer?

For at least 50 years, psychologists have been working very hard in the surface area of testing. Almost every aspect of human personality, behavior, mental attitude, and ability has at once or another come under the scrutiny of the tester. There accept been some notable successes in testing, near specially perhaps in the IQ and mechanical-power areas. Of belatedly, personality testing, particularly with the increasing use of projective techniques, has gained a sure level of sophistication. The area which has been to date well-nigh barren of real scientific success has been bent testing, where the aptitude consists of personality dynamics rather than simple mechanical abilities.

Four reasons.

The ability to sell, an exceedingly human and totally nonmechanical aptitude, has resisted attempts to measure information technology effectively. The reasons for this failure up until now are many, but there announced to be four basic causes for sales aptitude examination failure.

1. Tests have been looking for involvement, not ability.

The concept that a man'south involvement is equatable to his ability is possibly the unmarried largest cause of test failure. Thus, tests have been developed through request questions of successful salesmen or successful people in other fields, with the assumption that if an applicant expresses the same kind of interest pattern as an established salesman, he as well volition be a successful salesman.

This assumption is incorrect on its face. Psychologically, interest does not equal aptitude. Even if someone is interested in exactly the same specific things as Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, this of course does not in any fashion bespeak the possession of a like baseball skill. Equally, the fact that an individual might take the same involvement pattern as a successful salesman does not hateful that he tin can sell. Even if he wants to sell, it does not hateful that he can sell.

2. Tests take been eminently "fakable."

When an individual is applying for a job, he manifestly volition attempt to tell the potential employer whatsoever he thinks the employer wants to hear. Given a certain amount of intelligence, the applicant will know that he should say he would "rather be a salesman than a librarian," regardless of his existent preference. He knows that he should say he would "rather be with people than at dwelling house reading a good book," that he "prefers talking to a PTA group to listening to practiced music," or that he would "rather lead a group discussion than be a woods ranger."

There are manuals on the market on how to beat sales bent tests, merely, even without such a manual, the average intelligent person can speedily see what is sought and then give the tester what the tester wants. Thus, the tests may simply succeed in negatively screening those who are so unintelligent that they are unable to see the particular response pattern sought. In other words, since they are also boring to faux, they may be screened out. The perceptive interviewer, nonetheless, is likely to discover this kind of stupidity even more quickly than the tests do, and he can probably exercise a better chore of this negative screening than the average fakable examination.

3. Tests have favored group conformity, not individual creativity.

Recent critics of psychological testing decry the testers who are seeking conformity and the standardized means in which they approximate applicants for sales and other occupations. This criticism is all also valid. The creative thinker, the impulsive free spirit, the original, imaginative, hard-driving individual is oftentimes screened out by tests that demand rigid adherence to convention—an adherence, in fact, that borders on a passive credence of authority, a fear of anything that might in any way upset the applecart of bureaucratic order. Paradoxically, this fearful, cautious, disciplinarian conformist, although he might make a good ceremonious servant, or fifty-fifty a off-white controller or paperwork administrative executive, would never make a successful salesman.

Many of these tests not only fail to select expert salesmen, just they may actually screen out the actually height producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness. We discovered a state of affairs of this blazon recently in working with a customer: A company in the Southwest embarked on an intensive recruiting effort for salesmen. We began receiving the tests of a number of applicants. These tests all appeared to follow a certain pattern. The men were non quite recommendable, and all for well-nigh the same reason—a definite lack of ego drive. For the well-nigh function, they had some empathy, and without exception they had good verbal ability, just none had the intense inner need for the auction that nosotros look for in a productive salesman.

Many psychological tests screen out the really pinnacle producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness.

Afterwards almost 20 such tests came through our role, we questioned the sales manager as to what criteria he was using for screening the men who took the test. We found that before he gave the applicants our test, he had them take the sales aptitude test that had been developed past his company some years earlier. Those men who scored high on that test were given our exam.

We had previously analyzed that company'southward test and institute it to be a fairly practiced verbal abilities measure out, and to some extent a measure of intelligence and insight. Men with strong ego drive could not as a rule score near the top of that exam. And and so the very men with the quality we were seeking—strong ego bulldoze—were really screened out. We then asked the sales manager not to use that examination but to screen only for credit reference and full general appearance, and to give our test to those who passed this elementary screening. Afterward that we began seeing the expected number of "A" and "B" recommendable applicants—about one man in every five.

4. Tests have tried to isolate fractional traits rather than to reveal the whole dynamics of the human being.

Most personality and aptitude tests are totally traitological in their construction and arroyo. They run into personality as a series or "parcel" of piecemeal traits. Thus, someone may be high in "sociability" while being low in "self-sufficiency" and "dominance." Someone else may exist high in "personal relations" merely low in "cooperativeness." Somehow, the whole (or the gestalt) gets lost. The dynamic interaction that is personality, equally viewed by nearly modern-twenty-four hour period psychologists, is buried in a series of fractionalized, mathematically separable traits.

Thus, information technology is said that the salesman, somewhat like the Boy Scout, should be very "sociable," "dominant," "friendly," "responsible," "honest," and "loyal." The totality—the dynamics within the person that volition permit him to sell successfully—is really lost sight of. Conspicuously, someone may exist "sociable," "responsible," and and so on, but still be a very poor salesman.

In our research we attempted to featherbed traits and to get directly to the central dynamisms that we believed were basic to sales ability: empathy and ego drive. Past seeking these deeper, more central, characteristics, we immediately reduced the possibility of faking, since the respondent would find it extremely difficult to make up one's mind what in fact was being sought. Needless to say, the importance of interest as a variable has been reduced sharply, and the conformity factor has been completely subordinated to the basic central characteristics being measured. Thus, rather than starting with the question, "How practice salesmen collectively answer certain items?" nosotros began with the question, "What makes a really fine salesman?" and so, "How do y'all discover these human characteristics?"

This use of central dynamics rather than traits, with its corollary implications, has produced what we believe to be a positive method of predicting sales success that is advanced beyond what has been done to date.

Fallacy of Feel

Many sales executives feel that the type of selling in their industry (and fifty-fifty in their particular visitor) is somehow completely special and unique. This is true to an extent. In that location is no question that a information-processing equipment salesman needs somewhat unlike grooming and background than does an automobile salesman. Differences in requirements are obvious, and whether or non the applicant meets the special qualifications for a item job can easily exist seen in the applicant's biography or readily measured. What is not so hands seen, however, are the basic sales dynamics we have been discussing, which permit an individual to sell successfully, almost regardless of what he is selling.

To date, we have gained experience with more than 7,000 salesmen of tangibles every bit well as intangibles, in wholesale as well as retail selling, large-ticket and little-ticket items. And the dynamics of success remain approximately the same in all cases. Sales ability is primal, more and then than the product beingness sold. Long earlier he comes to know the production, mostly during his childhood and growing-upward experience, the futurity successful salesman is developing the human being qualities essential for selling. Thus, when accent is placed on experience, and experience counts more than such essentials as empathy and bulldoze, what is achieved can only be called the inbreeding of mediocrity.

Long before he comes to know the product, more often than not during his childhood and growing-upwards experience, the future successful salesman is developing the human being qualities essential for selling.

Nosotros have institute that the experienced person who is pirated from a competitor is most often piratable simply because he is not succeeding well with that competitor. He feels that somehow he can magically practice improve with the new company. This is rarely true. He remains what he is, mediocre, or worse. What companies need is a greater willingness to seek individuals with bones sales potential in the general marketplace. Experience is more or less easily gained, but real sales power is not at all so easily gained.

Amongst butchers, coal miners, steelworkers, and even the unemployed there are many—mayhap one in ten—who, whether they themselves know it or not, possess the ability to exist an A, pinnacle-producing salesman; and at least one in five would be on a B or better level for most types of selling. Many of these are potentially far better salesmen than some who have accumulated many years of feel. The case of "Big Jim," as we shall call him, is a skillful case: All nosotros knew about Jim at beginning was that he had walked into the showroom of one of our automobile clients in response to its advertizement and had taken our exam. Nosotros reported that he was the only A in the grouping, and strongly recommended that he be hired. In that location was shocked silence at the other end of the telephone. Nosotros were then told that his test had been included equally a joke.

As information technology was described to us, he had ambled into the showroom one morning time wearing dungarees, an old polo shirt, and sneakers. He had then gone on to proclaim, "I sure do hanker to sell them in that location cars." The dealer had included his test just to go a laugh, or perhaps to see if nosotros were sufficiently alert to weed him out. The man had never sold a motorcar or annihilation else in his life and had neither the appearance nor the background that would bespeak that he ever could sell anything.

Today he is 1 of the dealer'due south best salesmen. Soon after he started working, he "hankered to come across that at that place Seattle World'southward Off-white" and sold enough cars in the outset week of the calendar month to give him money to go there and spend two weeks. On his return he made enough money in the last week of the month to equal the staff'southward monthly boilerplate.

Obviously, near men downwards from the hills wearing dungarees and sneakers are non going to be top salesmen. Some, however, may be, and their lack of experience in no way reduces the possibility that they have the inner dynamics of which fine top producers are made. It is equally obvious that a great many men who nowadays a fine advent, a "good front," do not plough out to be elevation salesmen. The real question—and e'er the first question—is, "Does this human being have the bones inner dynamics to sell successfully?"

Background blindness.

Putting emphasis on experience often works in another way to reduce sales effectiveness. A company grows used to seeing its men in various job "slots," in sure departments, limited to special kinds of experience. Such men may be doing a satisfactory job where they are. But it frequently happens that the bullheaded addiction of "special experience" has kept the company from using the man in a more effective and advisable way. For case: A western company in the leasing business wanted us to evaluate a co-operative employing 42 men to determine why there had been a mediocre level of sales activity, why at that place had been some difficulties amid the men, and whether some of the 42 should mayhap be let become. Later on looking at the test of each person, we did an "Ten-ray" of the branch; that is, following the table of arrangement, nosotros evaluated the staff, department by department, especially in terms of who was working with, over, and under whom, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each section.

Virtually all the men on the staff were found to exist worth keeping on, but a practiced third were suggested for task shifts to other departments. Thus, the person with greatest sales ability, together with a peachy deal of managerial ability (by no means the same affair), was constitute in the accounting section. But that job did not completely satisfy him. He has since become the new branch sales manager, a more appropriate use of his considerable abilities.

One of the older men, though rated an acceptable B salesman, was evaluated equally an A office manager. He had good empathy, merely non the strongest ego drive, which was why he was a B rather than an A salesman. But on the managerial side, he had the ability to handle details, relatively rare for a salesperson; he was able to delegate dominance and brand decisions fairly rapidly and well. These qualities, plus his good empathy, gave him excellent potential as a managing director, but not every bit sales manager, for his only moderate drive would have hurt him in the latter position. Every bit office administrative manager, the position he was moved up into, he has performed solidly.

The former office authoritative managing director, a man well able to handle details reliably and responsibly, but with little empathy (and thus unable to deal understandingly with his office staff), was moved laterally into the accounting department, an area in which he had had some previous experience, and where he could carefully deal with and manage details rather than people.

Thus, what counts more than than experience is the homo'due south basic inner abilities. Each present employee, also as each new applicant, should be placed in the area where he can be well-nigh creative and productive.

Role of Training

The steelworker, the coal miner, the displaced cloth worker, or for that matter even "Big Jim," regardless of how much real sales ability each possesses, cannot suddenly start selling insurance, common funds, electronics equipment, or automobiles. Each 1 will need training. Companies have spent very big sums of money in developing constructive grooming programs. When they are working with a human with potential, these training programs can and exercise bring out this potential and develop an first-class salesman. Without sound grooming, even A-level salesmen are seriously limited.

All the same how frequently have men gone through long and expensive grooming programs just to fail totally when put out into the field? When this happens, the trainer, and perhaps the training programme itself, is blamed and sometimes even discarded. But most often it is neither the trainer nor the training program that is at fault; rather, it is the fact that they were given the incommunicable job of turning a sow'due south ear into a silk purse. The most skilled diamond polisher, given a piece of coal, can only succeed in creating a highly polished piece of coal; simply given the roughest blazon of uncut diamond, he tin can indeed turn it into the nearly precious stone. Here is a example in point: About three years ago, a company in the Northeast installed an especially fine training program, in which a great bargain of money was invested. At the end of two years, the results of this program were appraised. Information technology was found that sales had non increased beyond what might usually be expected in that industry during that menses of fourth dimension. The investment in the training program seemed to have been a total waste. The unabridged training program was therefore dropped. Half dozen months later, nosotros were asked by direction to test and evaluate the nowadays sales force and to try to determine why the training program, so highly recommended, had failed so badly.

The reason was immediately apparent. Out of a sales force of eighteen men, there was simply ane rating A, and his sales actually had improved afterward the preparation program. Two others were B-level salesmen, and they as well had improved to some extent with training. The remaining 15 men were "C" and "D" salesmen who should not take been selling in the first identify. They simply did not take the potential of skilful salespeople. They were rigid, opinionated, and for the most part seriously lacking in empathy. This type of man rarely responds to preparation, no matter how thoroughgoing the program. This was an obvious case of trying to make silk purses out of 15 assorted sow'south ears.

The role of grooming is clear. Information technology is vital. In today's highly competitive market place it is almost important to bring every employee up to his maximum potential of productivity. Efficiency in training, using the best of modernistic methods, is necessary to do this. Simply preparation tin succeed only if option succeeds. Practiced raw silk must be provided first, before the training department can be expected to produce the silk purses. Just as few manufacturers would allow their products to be produced on the footing of rough estimates of size and weight, but would demand scientific control of these basic characteristics, then too must the process of selection be fabricated more scientific and accurate.

The office of the salesman is so vital to the success of a company that it is amazing to these writers how little stress industry has placed on selecting the all-time raw material. To sell effectively in the U.S. market of today, a salesman needs to have empathy. To sell effectively in the foreign market place, crossing cultural lines, requires even more empathy. And marketing goods and services anywhere calls for a smashing deal of ego drive. The U.Southward. Department of Commerce recently stated that American industry has no problem with its production. Its primary problem is distribution. Effective salesmen are the key to distribution, and proper selection is the primal to finding, using, and profiting from salesmen of good quality.• • •

Industry must improve its ability to select height salesmen. Failure to engagement has stemmed from such errors as the belief that interest equals bent; the fakability of aptitude tests; the crippling emphasis on conformity rather than inventiveness; and the subdivision of a man into piecemeal traits, rather than understanding him as a whole person. Experience appears to be less important than a man's possession of the two central characteristics of empathy and ego bulldoze, which he must have to let him to sell successfully. Training tin can but succeed when the raw fabric is nowadays.

Selecting men with empathy and ego drive should contribute in some caste to helping industry meet ane of its most pressing problems: reducing the high cost of turnover and selecting genuinely better salesmen.

1. Robert N. McMurry,"The Mystique of Super-Salesmanship," HBR March–April 1961.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.