The answer is not an easy Yes, although there are enough qualities in women to suggest that women actually make better sales reps than men. Let’s look at some of the top qualities that one may look at an excellent sales rep,
Detail oriented
Analytical
Logical
Good at networking
Not impulsive
Driven to succeed
Can start and maintain good conversation
Empathy
Curious
Ambitious
… amongst several other related qualities/factors.
If one looks at each of these closely, and then checks the levels of compatibility with intrinsic qualities of both men and women, we would figure out that there are better chances of women having stronger competence in each of these above qualities.
Women, by virtue, are more detail-oriented than men (if you don’t believe that, then take your wife/girlfriend/mother for shopping) and generally don’t make the hasty errors that cost millions in sales for a lot of organisations.
Women are also known to be great conversationalists and are excellent at networking (they also manage to maintain such networks). Given that most of today’s working women would have seen their mothers/aunts as housewives and yearning for recognition from their male counterparts, they would be fiercely competitive and ambitious to make a mark of their own. This allows for space in learning and the drive to contribute amazing insights and thought-leadership to their work – which in this case would be sales processes or systems leading to great revenues.
I have personally known women to have comparatively fewer large bottleneck issues with gatekeepers or first-level decision makers. One of the benefits of being detail-oriented is the capacity to control discussions and outcomes of meetings with a certain specific decision maker in the decision-matrix.
One of the major challenges of women sales reps is the establishment of status-quo, which is a situation caused due to reaching that perfect time in life wherein they achieve everything that makes them contented. The perfect-balance is something that women reach faster than men, and therefore can have the disastrous effect of them plateauing at a very important juncture in their career. When that happens, the contentment factor plays a large role in creating an opposition strong enough to stymie all the good work and opportunities present. The motivation to continue being a rockstar sales rep is intrinsic and therefore has to be strong enough to win over the status-quo contentment that shuts out women sales reps.
Some of the best sales reps in the world who are followed for their inputs on sales (Jill Konrath, Elinor, Kelly, etc) are successful moms, wives and also brilliant sales leaders. A closer look at their profiles will make one thing pretty evident: that they found a reason large enough to pursue their love for sales, and have contributed almost equally (when compared) to their male-counterparts in taking sales to the next level.