We have seen a lot of people claiming that women are said to be better sellers or men are said to be better sellers. All these claims are mostly stated out of intuition instead of with a solid reason. So our team at ODIO recorded, speaker-separated, transcribed, and analyzed 10000+ sales calls of men and women to find out if gender affects close rates in sales. To make the study more statistically accurate, we tried to analyze the calls which were pulled out from companies that are similar to each other — same industry, similar sales cycle duration, and deal sizes, etc. Here are some statistics we got from our study:
- On an average men had a talk-to-listen ratio of 41:57 while women had 45:53, this shows that men are better listeners.
- Men interrupt at a rate of about 4x per hour while women do it 6.1x per hour, which is a lot more than men.
- Men usually take longer pauses than women before responding by about 0.5sec.
- Women in sales calls go off on a monologue of about 140 seconds on an average, while men do it for about 110 seconds only on a stretch.
It is clearly visible from the stats that men should be better sellers but in reality women’s win-rates were 12% higher than men’s (on average).
What is the reason behind this huge contradiction?
Every problem has a quantitative (data), and qualitative side. Without one, you can not tell the entire story. In this case, the quantitative side of the story is looking at sales conversation analytics while the qualitative side of the story is listening to sales call recordings.
Despite the fact that the stats portray men to be better listeners than women, it is possible that men could be thinking about something else while they’re supposed to be listening to their customer. Silence is not the same thing as listening.
It is important to understand the quality of sales calls. While analyzing two sales reps, a male and a female, over a sales call it was observed that the men rambled on in a way that derailed the conversation and hurt his credibility. He would often answer simple “yes/no questions” with a long-winded response that sparked more questions from the prospect. While the woman also talked too much, she was usually making strong selling points or sharing a customer story instead of rambling.
Men are often seen tossing around nerf balls while on the phone with their customers.
While men are talking less (and thereby assumed to be listening more), they are often in another world – while women are focused on their customer intently – talking or listening.
Thank you for reading this article. For continued insights and in-depth discussions, please follow our blogs at Odio.
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