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Exactly.

I have yet to meet a good salesperson who didn't research, listen, and react. That's part of the sales process.. to understood who you're selling to and why.

This is Sales 101 and has nothing to do with being a intro/extro-vert.

The best sales people I've worked with (in a software/services B2B context - specifically when the customers are large companies) are into long-term relationship and trust building.

They analyze the hell out of the customer from an organizational perspective and really try to figure out what problem they need to get solved.

They are definitely extroverts. They are interesting people to be around, have great conversational and wining and dining skills, etc.

They know their limits when it comes to technology and see themselves as facilitators of deep technical discussions between the prospective customer's tech people and the internal staff. They are happy to take the backseat when it comes to tech discussions - while still listening, taking notes, etc. (That they'll then come back with to i.e. me to try to understand and figure out the next step.)

  The best sales people I've worked with (in a software/services B2B 
  context - specifically when the customers are large companies) are 
  into long-term relationship and trust building.

Adding nuance, I was intrigued by an argument [0] that "relationship builders" weren't the out-performers in sales. In fact, they were the least likely to outperform in complex B2B sales.

[0] https://hbr.org/2011/09/selling-is-not-about-relatio

It obviously differs quite a lot depending on the type of customer.

An example where I have seen the type of relationship-building salesperson outperform the aggressive kind of sales person: sales to large, stable incumbent companies in Europe.

For sure! I think the nuance (and if you read the article and the study) is the best performers are consistently "assertive" -- or in the middle between passive and aggressive.

Yeah. They have to be able to carefully thread that needle between pushy/assertive vs annoying quite carefully and intelligently. And counteract the pushy factor with charm/hosting skills.

.. and that's why this job is so highly paid (the kind of people I'm talking about: ~300k/year or more).

This is spot-on. As someone who works in enterprise sales, the best performers (if performance is based on growing investment from the client into x product), are challengers.

Sales tactics, like aggressive selling or throwing everything at the wall see what sticks, does not work in enterprise sales. The enterprise sell is complex and nuanced based on all the decision makers and influencers. It helps to be less of a "classic-sales" person and more of a doctor. You want to diagnose, understand, and provide a recommendation. Often-times like a doctor, the client (patient) does not want hear or accept the solution (antidote). This is where the challenger mindset comes into play, the great sales folks are pushing for the "true solution" even if the client-team is not onboard. It can take time to get a champion on the client side who sees the light. Just to be clear enterprise sales only works if the solution is solving true business outcomes.

For selling to new clients, its important for the sales team to run a client diagnostic to understand if the product (solution) has a right to win. Its just the start of understanding the client. I will say getting to know the client and their hurdles is crucial and the clients are experts at their problems. But, they are not experts at solving it. That is why the sales person is there and why the product exists.

To be clear, introverts can also be "interesting people to be around" and "have great conversational and wining and dining skills".

The difference between an introvert and an extrovert doesn't lie in one's abilities in that regard, or even in whether or not one enjoys social interaction, but rather in whether one finds social interaction to be energizing or exhausting.

The article seems to misunderstand this difference, too, but in a different way: by equating "extrovert" and "introvert" with what are often colloquially referred to as "A-type" and "B-type" personalities (or maybe "red" and "blue", or some other distinction along those lines). Just like with leadership positions ("A-types want to lead, but B-types are better at it"), the conventional wisdom is that "A-types" are more likely to actually want to be in a sales position, but "B-types" are more likely to actually win over a customer. Extroversion and introversion are probably correlated here, but I reckon it having more to do about one's approach to communication with others.

As a contrast, the worst sales people I have been around are extrovert and think they know the tech, so the can handle everything on their own. This has inevitably resulted in losses/disasters.

These kind of sales people are a better fit when the product has been in the marketplace for 1-2 years and has survived ~5-10 customers. By then it's a lot more packaged and well-defined. You still need a strong central sales "command structure" though.

I have actually met some (semi-)introverted sales people. They never made any sales, or got anywhere close to it.

In my experience, computer-related B2B, that's pretty much spot on. I've never known a successful sales rep who didn't come across as an extrovert by any reasonable definition of the word. Did they all start out that way and it just came naturally? I have no idea.

But that doesn't mean they're all the frat boy stereotype, taking customers out wining and dining all the time, and then signing the deal on the golf course.

Rather they spend a lot of time and effort navigating large organizations, engaging technical people to talk with and work with the right people at the customer, and developing a relationship that will eventually lead to a sale.

" has nothing to do with being a intro/extro-vert."

I think it does.

Extroverts are 'outwardly focused' - meaning 'present' - paying attention to others, the world around them.

Introverts are 'inwardly focused', more in their heads.

Obviously, people can do both - but extroverts have a lifetime of skills in 'relationship management'. They know how to do small talk, how to set the mood, how to change the subject, how to engage with a difficult subject.

> Extroverts are 'outwardly focused' - meaning 'present' - paying attention to others, the world around them. Introverts are 'inwardly focused', more in their heads. Obviously, people can do both - but extroverts have a lifetime of skills in 'relationship management'. They know how to do small talk, how to set the mood, how to change the subject, how to engage with a difficult subject.

This is a common misconception, but that's actually not how the words "introversion" and "extraversion"[sic] are used either by Jung or by contemporary psychology. It's hard to classify the distinction in a single sentence, but to generalize: introversion and extroversion have more to do with how a person 'receives' external stimuli, not in how they react or respond to it.

Extroverts are not inherently better at "relationship management" skills like small talk, how to change the subject, or how to engage with difficult subjects.

> Extroverts are not inherently better at "relationship management" skills like small talk, how to change the subject, or how to engage with difficult subjects.

Since this flies in the face of common sense (and my personal experience of 20 years in selling B2B software).. do you have any research to back up this claim? (Besides name-dropping Carl Gustav Jung.)

> do you have any research to back up this claim?

I'd recommend reading Susan Cain's Quiet as a starting point. It's very accessible for people without a background in psychology, and it references the original research where appropriate.

"introversion and extroversion have more to do with how a person 'receives' external stimuli, not in how they react or respond to it."

Yes - I understand the more precise popular definition.

But I believe that people who enjoy being around other people are far more 'present' than those who do not.

> But I believe that people who enjoy being around other people are far more 'present' than those who do not.

You may believe it, but that's not what the body of psychology research says.

> frankly the introvert extrovert juxtaposition is trite at this point

Why? There's a huge amount of published research in the I/E scale in forms like the FFM. We have Ph.D.s on HN who are deeply involved in psychometrics and work with these models every day.

> But why can't extroverts be good at research and listening?

This is a much better point. They can.

The weird thing about this article is that the author uses a dichotomy like E/I, then seems to suggest that all customers dislike E salespeople. Or that, maybe, all E salespeople are the same type of person. That's simply not true.

> What if you're driven and enjoy a good balance of quiet time and social time?

This is also crucial, the question of personality type vs. personality type _development_.

Trite doesn't mean inherently bad, it's just beaten to death on a very shallow level. If you were to list the most overused themes that hot takey bloggers use to build theses around, this is one of them. And it’s a shame because I’m sure there is a lot of new, interesting, and legitimate research being done on the subject. Unfortunately that research isn’t involved in a lot of these kinds of articles, for example this one.

Trite has an undeniable negative connotation. If you want to hedge the word, don't use the word. Further, you are saying this is bad...

Spot on. There is a real, measurable difference that scientists call extroverted or introverted. Then there's a bunch of stereotypical behaviors and attributes assigned to each. This article uses the latter.

Yup, I've had high energy loud talkative sales people be great at presenting data, knowing the competition, etc. This introvert vs extrovert nonsense is getting out of hand.

That is one way of acting for extrovert people. I think it's a lot more common in North America than in Europe. There's something cultural at play here.

Questioning the introvert/extrovert dichotomy rarely goes well on Hacker News or on any tech discussion forum, so it's a somewhat unusual that you are not being downvoted hard (even though it's a small part of your point).

He didn't question the dichotomy. Quite the opposite--"Theres obviously a lot to learn from archetypal human behavior." Alternatively, depending on what was meant by archetypal, he at least didn't contradict it.

He was simply saying that its relevance has been exaggerated and twisted. And that's, frankly, difficult to disagree with. The introversion-extroversion dichotomy has been turned into a popular psychology vehicle. But you can't judge the vehicle by the absurd places people take it.

In any event, like most such dichotomies, it's implicitly understood to be a generalization, and generalizations are not suitable for describing or predicting more specific behaviors.