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SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: SALES

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BY DAV I D M AY E R A N D H E R B E R T M . G R E E N B E R G

What
Makes a
Good
Salesman
M

the
insurance industry embarked
on an intensive program to
solve the problem of costly,
wasteful turnover among its agents. Estimates at that time indicated that there
was a turnover of better than 50% within
the first year and almost 80%within the
first three years. After the expenditure
of millions of dollars and 35 years of research, the turnover in the insurance
industry remains approximately 50%
within the first year and 80% within the
first three years.

164

ORE THAN 35 YEARS AGO,

What is the cost of this turnover?
Nearly incalculable. Consider:
• the substantial sums paid new salesmen as salary, draw oncommission,
expense accounts, and so on, which
are wasted when those salesmen
fail to sell;
• the staggering company costs, in time,
money, and energy, of recruiting, selecting, training, and supervising men
who inherently do not have the ability
to succeed; and
• the vast costs caused by lost sales, dropouts, reduced company reputation,
harvard business review | hbr.org

LEIGH WELLS

Beforethey have received even a day of training, the
best salespeople already have two seemingly incompatible
qualities in abundance: empathy with customers and a
need to overcome their hesitation to buy.

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: SALES

poor morale, permanently burned
territory, and the like.
What accounts for this expensive inefficiency? Basically this: Companies have
simply not known what makesone man
able to sell and another not. As Robert
N. 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 can be enhanced….We
must look agood deal further – into
the mysteries of personality and psychology – if we want real answers.1
It was the obvious need for a better
method of sales selection that led us to
embark on seven years of field research
in this area. The article that follows is
based on the insights we gained as to
the basic characteristics necessary for a
salesman to be able to sell successfully.
Confirming thefact that we are on the
right track is the predictive power of
the selection instrument (battery of
tests) that we developed out of the same
research; see the exhibit “How Well an
Instrument Measuring Empathy and
Ego Drive Predicted Sales Success.”

Two Essentials
Our basic theory is that a good salesman must have at least two basic qualities: empathy and ego drive.
Ability to feel.Empathy, the important central ability to feel as the other
fellow 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 being
sympathetic. One can know what the
David Mayer was a principal officer of
Marketing Survey and Research Corporation of New York. Herbert M. Greenberg is the president and CEO of CaliperManagement, a human resources consulting firm based in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a coauthor of How to Hire
and Develop Your Next Top Performer
(McGraw-Hill, 2000).
166

other fellow feels without agreeing
with that feeling. But 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 bedrawn in this connection between the old antiaircraft
weapons and the new heat-attracted
missiles. With the old type of ballistic
weapon, the gunner would take aim at
an airplane, correcting as best he could
for windage and driftage, and then fire.
If the shell missed by just a few inches
because of a slight error in calculation
or because the plane took evasive action, the miss might just...