Neil Rackham: issue of trust.

Behaviours that help you sell

Citing a large-scale Xerox study, he told his audience of MBA students that ‘women quite clearly make better salespeople than men’. Acknowledging that women tend to be cheaper to employ than men, he went on to highlight the point that, ‘culturally, women use more of the behaviours that also coincidentally also help you sell’.

Women tend to be better at listening than men and are also skilled at developing rapport. Primarily, the issue is one of trust, according to the visiting professor, who contributes to Britain’s only sales management masters degree programme at the school.

Below the water line

Using the analogy of an iceberg – with one third visible above the surface and two-thirds below the water line – he likened the top third to people’s visible behaviour or ‘external information’; the bottom two-thirds, meanwhile, represent the beliefs, motives and attitudes which make up our ‘internal information’.

‘Trust is how far you can see under the water,’ Rackham told the students. Women tend to reveal more of their internal information when interacting in social situations and so tend to build trust faster.

‘Women give twice as much internal information as men do,’ he said. This is particularly useful in a stressful sales situation in which people anyway tend to become more closed up.

Different approaches

Rackham illustrated the difference between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ perspectives with an illustration relating to a business meeting: men might typically say ‘this meeting’s going on too long’ (external view) while women in the same situation might say ‘I’m bored with this meeting’ (internal view).

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