How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, 2nd edition: The Qualities That Make Salespeople Great, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 10

Hunters and Farmers

In virtually every study we have conducted of successful salespeople, we have found that the best succeed when they have a combination of the three qualities we’ve been discussing so far—ego-drive, empathy, and ego-strength. By way of example, when we combine all our studies of salespeople, we find that the mean score of the top performers is at the sixty-eighth percentile of ego-drive. Simply put, top salespeople have more ego-drive than 68 percent of the population at large.

This does, however, pose an interesting question: How do some successful salespeople thrive when their ego-drive is in the midrange or even lower? What we have found is that it depends on the nature of the sales position. Our research points ...