Wednesday April 27, 2016: Mounting research evidence suggests that the wider the range of ages and backgrounds in a sales team, the more buyers they attract and the more sales they make.
The latest multinational to prove the truth of this is the London-based services company EY, in a huge study that compared the performance of 22,000 account teams.
EY’s headline results, reported in this week’s APS white paper on diversity and inclusion, show a significant difference in performance between the teams that were diverse and those that were not.
In the diverse teams, sales growth was on average 10 per cent faster and profit margins were six per cent higher.
In another significant cost-saving for a company whose most valuable asset is its personnel, staff retention was up seven per cent in the inclusive teams.
“Making sure all our people’s voices are heard and valued not only helps attract and retain the best people, but also helps us deliver better approaches for our clients and our organisation,” says Michael Thompson, EY’s advisory accounts and business development leader EYEIA.
But why does diversity help companies sell more? One reason is that people from a wider variety of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds, including both sexes and a range of age groups, will inevitably come up with a more imaginative range of solutions when they hit a problem, says Claire Edmunds, CEO of Clarify and chairman of the APS community group on D&I.
“Diversity of thought is shown to drive innovation and to improve performance and decision-making throughout the sales cycle, when taken in an inclusive environment,” writes Edmunds.
Another reason is that today’s customers are so diverse, and prone to respond better to a salesperson they can identify with, she adds. “Equally, the cultural match between seller and buyer is a predictor of sales success.”
Globalisation has meant that customers can be spread all over the world, but even in the same country the range of needs has never been more diverse.
A 2012 study on marketing to the generations, published in the Journal of Behavioural Studies in Business, highlights the stark contrasts between customers of retirement age, who like to be approached through traditional TV and magazine advertising, and are particularly interested in travel services and health foods, and their grandchildren in Generation Y, who want to buy clothes and cars, expect to be wooed with sophisticated digital content and pick up ideas through social media.
Edmunds promises that today’s APS paper on D&I will not be the last, and urges business leaders to be more curious about the advantages of boosting diversity.
“One of the APS aims is to share examples of best practice by highlighting business initiatives that have delivered improvements in sales performance through increasing diversity,” she writes.
“Enlightening and encouraging sales leaders to recognise the value of diverse and inclusive sales cultures will, we believe, positively impact sales performance management moving forward.”
jennybootheditorial 