Saw this on LinkedIn and thought it interesting.

Written by Steve W. Martin in Harvard Business Review

If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, “What makes you different from the average sales rep?” you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because most successful salespeople are simply doing what comes naturally.

Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world’s leading companies. I’ve also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.

The main key personality attributes of top salespeople are:

1. Modesty
2. Conscientious
3. Achievement
4. Curiosity
5. Lack of gregariousness (a surprise finding)
6. Lack of Discouragement
7. Not embarrassable

Read the full article here:

Seven traits of successful sales people