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Most of us believe that extroverts make the best salespeople. And what the research shows is that extroverts are more likely to go into sales jobs. Extroverts are more likely to get hired in sales jobs. Extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. The only thing that should make us look askance at this just for a moment is that when scholars have looked at the link between extroversion and sales performance, okay, not who gets hired or promoted but who sells stuff – the correlation is basically zero. Now, does this mean that introverts are better sellers than extroverts? This would be very, very good news for some of us. Well, here’s what the research from a fellow named Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania has shown. He went to a large software company that had a large salesforce. He measured the introversion and extroversion levels of the salesforce. Then they went out and sold software.
So who sold more software – the introverts or the extroverts? It turned out that the extroverts sold more than the introverts. So sorry, introverts, the extroverts did a little better. But that’s not the big takeaway. The big takeaway is that neither group did nearly as well as a third group. The ambiverts. The ambiverts. Now this sounds almost like kind of a made up word but it’s actually a term that’s been in the literature since the 1920s. And it describes people who are somewhat introverted and somewhat extroverted. They’re not strongly one way or the other. And it turns out the ambiverts are by far the most effective sellers.
Don’t be too introverted
Why? They’re ambidextrous. They’re attuned. They know when to speak up, they know when to shut up. They know when to push, they know when to hold back. Now, strong introverts often are too quiet, don’t assert. That’s a big liability. Strong extroverts – the people we think are the naturals, you know, the back slapping, glad handing, grinning, hey buddy what can I do to put you in a Ford Fiesta kind of guys – those are the people we think are great.
Don’t be too extroverted
They’re not. They actually don’t do very well at all because they come on too strong, they’re too pushy, and most important they don’t listen. And the people who do the best are those in the middle, a little bit of each. Now, here’s the best news of all about that. If you look at the distribution of introversion and extroversion in the population, here’s what it shows. Some of us are very strong introverts but not that many of us. Some of us are very strong extroverts, but not that many of us. Most of us are a little bit of both. Most of us are ambiverts. So what it shows is that there’s in some ways, a natural thing that human beings do and that most of us can get reasonably adept at it by simply being a little bit more like ourselves.