Diversity and inclusion: An imperative for sales The sales function—at least in the US—has been our objectives and key results, into the way that our slow when it comes to increasing gender and racial executives talk about the business, into our core diversity. In 2019, 76 percent of salespeople in operating principles, and into our reviews. How are the United States were white, and the number has you serving the customer and the user? Part of that barely changed in the last decade. Women account has to be that I’m serving everyone, not just the for less than one-third of all B2B sales roles, falling people that look like me.” to just a quarter in the technology sector. The higher up the organization, the fewer women there Some companies have been successful here. are: only 12 percent of the top sales jobs are held A leading business-information services firm, by women. Yet research suggests that women in where more than 40 percent of the salesforce B2B sales outperform men—86 percent of women are women (a proportion that carries through to regularly achieved quota compared to 78 percent of higher management roles), has taken steps to make men, according to a 2020 Harvard Business Review the organization more diverse by encouraging 10 report. employee referrals for hires. And the head of sales at a professional-services company told us that its The sales leaders we spoke to believe that diversity leadership walks the talk: all six of the senior-level is needed and is desirable, though admit that it is appointments made over the last 12 months are very much a work in progress. The head of strategy from diverse backgrounds. The company has also at a leading technology firm expressed the view of created diverse interviewer panels to overcome many: “Having a diverse salesforce is necessary if biases in interviews—and has included diversity as a we are serving diverse customers … [The value of metric in its quarterly reviews. diversity] has been embedded into the culture, into consultative sales model, the company needed to training on these skills, improved its coaching develop a training program for reps. Using data program, and set up a long-term training structure analytics, it discovered three crucial issues. that made capability building a key enabler of sales growth. First, reps spent too much time on non-selling activities. Second, there was a large disconnect Our research shows that companies can boost the between how effectively sales managers thought lifetime value of sellers by 10 percent by making they were coaching reps, and how the reps the right hires, optimizing onboarding, building perceived the coaching. Third, sales reps and capabilities, and retaining the right people. The managers believed that relationship and network analytics underpin this: using psychometrics, building were key skills for customer growth, behavioral data, performance, and team or when in fact sales analytics showed that pipeline relational analytics, organizations can build targeted management, prospecting, and product knowledge interventions at every stage of a salesperson’s were more important. The company focused its tenure. 10 Andris A. Zoltners et al., “Why women are the future of B2B sales,” Harvard Business Review, May 28, 2020. Future of B2B sales: The big reframe 29