The under-representation of women in sales

CASSI ROPER considers the surprising under- representation of women in the sales profession

If I told you there was a way to increase your win-rate by 11%, you’d raise an eyebrow. If I added that it would also improve your working environment, bring fresh optimism to your whole sales team and give you new insights, you’d probably be suspicious.

Fortunately, it’s a weapon anyone in sales can employ: women.

Research by Gong, a firm that supplies a self-learning conversation analytics engine, has revealed that women close 11% more deals than men. This wasn’t some minor study either – it was the result of analysing 30,469 sales calls. The research concluded that women also close deals at a faster rate than men.

Similarly, when Joël Le Bon was a professor at the University of Houston Bauer College of Business, he gave the students of his sales CRM class a sales assignment every semester. Over 16 semesters from 2010 to 2018, there were 59% more top-performing women than men – and the women outperformed the men by 52%.

That’s a promising start, but there’s a problem.

While statistics from sources like the US Bureau of Labor show that the ratio of women in sales occupations is 49%, big variations occur

across industry sectors. For example, in the securities, commodities and financial services sector, it’s 32%, while in the manufacturing parts sector it falls to 10.4%. In the technology sector, which I’m in, the figure falls even further. The 2018 Gender Equity Roadmap from Women in Tech World shows that the number of women in sales or business development roles in tech companies is just 10.1% – a figure that used to match our own experience at Redgate.

So, if you’re in the same position as we were at Redgate a while ago, what can you do to start reaping the rewards of a having a more genderbalanced sales team?

THINK ABOUT RECRUITMENT ADS DIFFERENTLY It starts with job ads because, very often unconsciously, we all use words that have a male or female bias. You can find out what they are by using free online tools like Gender Decoder, where you copy and paste the text for a job ad and it tells you which words are subtly coded as masculine or feminine.

For example, words like “driven”, “leadership” and “battle” are seen as masculine, while words like “support”, “collaborate” and “trusted” are seen as more feminine. The thing is, women tend not to apply for roles where the job description sounds like companies are looking for male applicants. Because, in general, women are more collaborative than competitive, they’re also turned away by superlatives like “expert” or “world-class”.

That leads to sources like the 2019 Gender Insights Report from LinkedIn Talent Solutions revealing that women are 16% less likely than men to apply for a job after reading the job description. Yet the same report also shows that women are 16% more likely than men to get hired after applying for a job.

Incidentally, words like “weapon” are also very masculine and I used it deliberately in the headline of this article because only 19% of women in sales are in leadership positions.

THINK ABOUT THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS DIFFERENTLY One of the biggest ways we find new salespeople is to hold recruitment days for entry-level positions. An external consultant will line up 12 or more potential candidates and they all come in on the same day and take part in group exercises to demonstrate what skills they have.

We asked the consultant to make more of an effort to encourage females to apply and also change the way the ads about the roles were written. It worked too. More women did come forward, but we found we were still setting them up to fail. We were putting them in a setting where they were surrounded by confident guys and they were, quite frankly, intimidated by it. As a result, most of them weren’t stepping forward and speaking up, and showing us what they could really do.

So, we changed the group work into separate teams of males and females. It won’t surprise you to learn that because we’d given them an environment where they could be a lot more assured that their opinions would be heard, the female candidates suddenly shone through and became very employable.

We’ve gone from employing virtually no females for sales roles to finding three or four on every recruitment day. We’re now aiming for 30% of new hires to be female and I’m pretty confident we’ll get there.

My view is that you can’t just wait for females to knock on the door, because they don’t naturally apply for sales roles. You have to go out and find the candidates you want – and then give them the opportunity to shine.

WATCH HOW YOUR SALES TEAM STARTS TO WORK DIFFERENTLY I used to look over the sales floor and see a team of almost identical people – young, male, confident, often with a fashionable beard, and very good at what they did. It was entirely understandable, almost natural, for my sales managers to hire people that were like them, to continue with this apparent formula for success.

At the same time, though, no one was pushing back on the way we were doing things because everybody was thinking in the same way. It’s a bit like having a first line team of managers who all agree with everything you do – when, in fact, that’s not what you want. You need to be challenged into different ways of working and thinking, because it’s not productive to do the same things over and over without ever questioning them or trying to improve them.

Now, our salesfloor has been transformed. Bringing more women into the team has changed the atmosphere, the environment and the topics of conversation. Everyone – including the guys – has given positive feedback.

I’m not going to bang a drum, though, and say it’s because females make better salespeople. They don’t – they make different salespeople and, in general, they connect with clients in a different, more collaborative way. They tend to like values and purpose and lean towards ethical selling and creating partnerships with clients.

In the end, it’s more than a numbers game. Bringing diversity to the salesfloor brings with it new thinking, new ideas, and new methods that help everyone to be better at what they do.

“Bringing diversity to the salesfloor brings with it new thinking, new ideas, and new methods that help everyone to be better at what they do”

CASSI ROPER is sales director at Redgate Software, heading up the EMEA and APAC regions. In 2018, she received Sales Director of the Year Award at the British Excellence in Sales Management Awards (BESMA). Having worked in software sales for over 15 years, she has experience across all aspects of the sales process, with a focus on team leadership and the accounts-based sales approach. She particularly enjoys the challenges of building sales teams in new territories and bringing stakeholders across the company together to land complex technical sales. She can be contacted at: Cassi.Roper@red-gate.com