‘SuperSalesMan’ or ‘WonderSalesWoman’?

Who are the Sales Superheroes?

Tony Hughes published an interesting article on LinkedIn, i.e., Women Sell Better Than Men.

At the AA-ISP Inside Sales Conference in Dallas, Andy Kellam and Kristina Sieper from LinkedIn asked me if I had such data for colleges' sales programs. This sparked an interesting discussion on Sales Superheroes, and Top Performers.

Through my sales, sales management, consulting, or researcher experiences, I have some insights on this question. Yet I would like to offer another perspective, the one from a professor when I was involved with the University of Houston - Bauer College of Business, Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute, and preparing future generation of sales professionals.

Although the sales data comes from 'inexperienced young sales students', it provides quite interesting insights about Millennials engaged in sales education, and eager to be well prepared for a sales career.

First, some background

The sample pertains to my Sales CRM Class database, i.e., 1,042 sales students (47% men, 53% women) from 2010 through 2018, i.e., 16 semesters.

In this class, I taught my students how to sell and leverage Social CRM technologies such as Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. For their sales assignment, they had to sell openings for players and sponsorships for the PESOpen.

Their sales quota was $800 ($500 for a foursome + $300 of golf sponsorships). The students received a sales territory of about 250 accounts, and had 8 weeks to learn Social CRM technologies, and sell the golf tournament. If they didn't make their sales quota, the likelihood for them to pass the class was quite low...

Now, the results

Since 2010, and from a sales volume standpoint, the sales students have sold a total of 8,745 players, averaging 547 players per golf tournament.

Hence, the 'inexperienced young sales students' did have some great sales experience, knew how to prospect, close, and thus benefited from a much faster ramp up upon joining a sales organization.

From a sales revenue standpoint, they have sold for a total of $1,990,984.31, averaging $1,924 of sales per student.

Yes, that's real sales dollars 'closed won' by real young sales professionals with real B2B and B2C customers.

So, ‘SuperSalesMan’ or ‘WonderSalesWoman’?

Since 2010, 7 Top Producers were men, and 10 Top Producers were women!

The alumni men Top Producers were:

• Kristopher McDaniel (Spring 2010)
• Will Diaz (Fall 2010)
• Joel Powell (Spring 2013)
• Ali Lakhani (Fall 2013)
• Sammy Rahman (Spring 2014)
• Clément Le Bon (Spring 2016)
• Joe Ridyard (Spring 2018)

Together, the alumni men Top Producers have sold for a total of $74,572, averaging $10,653 per sales student (std. dev.: $4,295)

And the alumni women Top Producers were:

• Vania Luti (Spring 2011)
• Liea Torres (Fall 2011)
• Jessica Moreno (Spring 2012)
• Stacie Zollars (Fall 2012)
• Rachel Milstein (Fall 2014)
• Naomi Cosman (Spring 2015)
• Brittanee King (Fall 2015)
• Shirin Lakhani (Fall 2016)
• Alyssa Nemec (Spring 2017)
• Elissa Stone (Fall 2017)

Together, the alumni women Top Producers have sold for a total of $113,412, averaging $11,341 per sales student (std. dev.: $9,039)

Although, over the years, women Top Producers have sold for more, the standard deviation was also of bigger magnitude, which reveals more variation in their sales performance.

Yet in 8 years, and regarding Top Performers, we had 58.8% more ‘WonderSalesWomen’ than ‘SuperSalesMen’!

And ‘WonderSalesWomen’ have outperformed ‘SuperSalesMen’ by 52%!

With the development of sales-enabled technologies and when it comes to tomorrow's Sales Superheroes, my colleague and good friend Dr. Howard Dover from The University of Texas at Dallas talks about the ‘IronMan’, but perhaps we should say the ‘IronWoman’!