members of CEB’s sales program—heads of sales from the world’s largest,
best-known companies—we set out to identify what exactly set this very
special group of sales reps apart. And having now studied that question
intensively for the better part of four years,
spanning dozens of companies
and thousands of sales reps, we have discovered three core insights that
have fundamentally rewritten the sales playbook and led B2B sales
executives all over the world to think very differently about how they sell.
The first insight was something we weren’t originally even looking for.
It turns out that just about every B2B sales rep in the world falls into one of
five distinct profiles, a specific set of skills and behaviors that define his or
her primary mode of interacting with customers. Now, that’s interesting in
and of itself, as you’ll be able to find yourself
and your colleagues in these
profiles when you see them. These five profiles prove to be an incredibly
practical way of dividing the world into a manageable set of alternative
sales techniques.
That said, it’s really the second insight that changes everything. When
you take those five profiles and compare them with actual sales
performance, you find there is a very clear winner and a very clear loser:
One of them spectacularly outperforms the other four, while one of them
falls dramatically behind. Yet there is something very disturbing about these
results. When we show them to sales leaders,
we hear the same thing again
and again. These leaders find the results deeply troubling, because they’ve
placed by far their biggest bet on the profile least likely to win. This one
insight has shattered the way many sales leaders think about the kind of
reps they need to survive and thrive in a tough economy.
And that brings us to the third and final core insight from this work—
arguably the most explosive of them all. As we dug deeper into the data, we
found something even more surprising. While we’d set out four years ago to
find the winning recipe for sales rep success in a down economy, all of the
data indicate something far more important. The
profile most likely to win
isn’t winning
because
of the down economy, but
irrespective
of it. These
reps are winning because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because
they’ve mastered a complex economy. In other words, when we unlocked
the mystery of high performance in the down economy,
the story turned out
to be much bigger than anyone had anticipated. Your very best sales reps—
the ones who carried you through the downturn—aren’t just the heroes of