Do you think extroverts or introverts make the best salespeople? Actually, the best salespeople over the long term are ambiverts, the people in the middle. The extremes on either side, the strong introverts and the strong extroverts, actually perform about the same as each other, both well behind the ambiverts. While it’s easy to understand why introverts don’t excel at sales, extroverted salespeople tend to burn bright and then burn out.
On the Big Five personality model, extraversion sits on a scale, and the further out toward either extreme someone sits, the more effort it costs them to operate outside their natural range. An ambivert sitting around fifty percent extraversion can flex down to thirty or up to seventy without much strain, they’ve got real range in both directions. Someone sitting at ninety percent trying to dial down to thirty is fighting their own wiring the whole time, and the same goes in reverse for a strong introvert forced to perform at seventy. This matters because our actual job in sales is to mirror the person in front of us, and the people with the natural range to do that without burning fuel are, unsurprisingly, the ones sitting closer to the middle.
I have long tried to describe one of the real challenges of sales, and there’s not really a term for it. I have always just called it being personality depleted.
As salespeople, our personality is our currency. Our job is a performance. Like a geisha, we are charming and charismatic and friendly, and we make it all about the customer. We become a supporting actor to the customer’s starring performance. This is something the really charming, charismatic salespeople in particular need to be aware of. You put on the mask, become enthusiastic, interested, funny, engaging and persuasive. You are good with people, and it works. You win.
Salespeople have a unique perspective on many things. For example, I hate after work drinks and team activities with a passion. I have spent all day being switched on, talking to people, being charming and managing relationships. I don’t want to go out afterwards and do more of it. It feels like more work, more mask wearing, more charisma, more charm. It is often worse for salespeople, because we are the ones expected to motivate and make the ten pin bowling experience fun for all the accountants and shelf fillers. It never feels like a bonus to us, it just feels like more work. The closest I can explain it so you might understand is, it’s like being around emotional vampires and narcissists, the same feeling of someone wanting more of your attention, time and support.
I had a woman ask me on a date recently, and I said, “You mean pick you up, take you to a restaurant, have charming small talk for a few hours?” She said, “Yes, exactly.” I had a physical reaction and said to her, “I would do everything in my power to avoid that, you would honestly need to pay me ten thousand dollars.” While she thought I was an asshole, I was just protecting my core.
I think the same thing happens in sales with charming people. The dangerous part is that these people can be extremely successful for a while. Their personality carries them, they win business. But they cross a line where prospecting becomes harder, follow up drops off, and the effort involved to win a sale becomes greater than the reward.
One of my first sales jobs, I had a boss take me out for drinks one Friday, without the rest of the team. He said, “You’re not very good at this.”
To which I protested, “I’m the only one in the whole company who hits every target every week.”
He replied, “Yes, I know. Don’t get me wrong, if I could have ten of you I’d be a multi millionaire. What I’m trying to tell you is that you need to work ten times harder than anyone else to achieve it. It’s not sustainable.”
I call this the charisma trap, because you can turn on the charm, increase enthusiasm, and win sales without ever bothering to build a repeatable sales process. Your charm becomes your sales process, so when your personality is depleted, your sales performance goes to hell.
The answer isn’t to become less charismatic or to learn more sales skill. It’s to build a repeatable sales process that doesn’t require you to be “on” every minute of the day.
As humans we are up and down, happy and sad, this and that, minute by minute. That’s healthy, natural human behaviour. Watch for when you are about to go into a sales call or a sales pitch. Look at the inner well of energy you need, the charm levels, the persona mask you need to put on, if you need to hype yourself up. If you find a gap between the energy you have and the energy you need, then the answer is a better process.
Charm is brilliant in sales. But too much is just gross. Using it as a crutch will burn you out.
The research behind this
The closest established concepts to what I’ve always called being personality depleted are emotional labour and surface acting, both from sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 book The Managed Heart, emotional exhaustion, one of the three core components of burnout identified by Maslach and Jackson in 1981, ego depletion, Roy Baumeister’s 1998 finding that self control draws from a limited resource that depletes with use, and emotional dissonance, the strain of the gap between what you’re actually feeling and what you’re performing, first named by Hochschild and developed further by Zapf in 2002. On the opening point, Adam Grant’s 2013 study out of Wharton tracked 340 outbound sales reps and found ambiverts outsold both strong introverts and strong extroverts by 24 to 32%, with the two extremes performing about the same as each other.
