Why Do We Need More Women In Sales

We often hear from all corners that women should be given more participation and stake in politics, administration, sports, and science domain but seldom do we hear people, women, in particular, speaking out loud to ensure more female involvement in the domain of Sales and Marketing.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t feel that surprising to us, doesn’t it? This is because of the major reason, right from that moment when we think about sales personnel, the image that strikes our mind is of a clean shaved, well-groomed, and formally dressed male figure with an attractive smile on his face. This is majorly because of the long-term influence of TV advertisements and mainstream movies, which portrayed women as someone who cannot indulge in sensible talking had in us.

But how statistically supported is this belief?

Recent studies and experiments put forward that these popular beliefs are nowhere near the truth is. Rather most of them have credited women to be better marketers than men too.

The major reason to point out for this visible success of women in sales and marketing is their ability to generate the emotion of empathy better than their male counterparts. Even though the general belief perceives marketing as a matter of spin and persuasion, the reality has always been different. It is fundamentally a challenge of understanding. Since the primary issue for all marketers is to read their consumers and convert that into sales, without any basic empathy towards their targets, all marketing efforts can mostly end up in vain only.

It is clear, therefore, why women have such a psychological advantage when it comes to marketing. Their brains are simply better at understanding others. Male marketers believe that their own thoughts and reactions can be extrapolated to those of the market while Female marketers, in contrast, are more likely to get inside the nerves of the market and devise their strategies on the real needs of consumers.

But the sad truth is, until recent times even when the statistics were heavily tilted in their favor, the majority of women who are ready to take up marketing careers were restricted to just telemarketing and front office jobs in many organizations. Many times, they were confined to profiles that were nowhere near to use their maximum skill or potential.

Having said all this, it is not like things are completely bleak everywhere. Many companies, especially Startups, with young and fresh-minded brains leading them, have started trying to maintain a good male-female ratio in their sales force in recent times. They have started to use the women marketers beyond their front-end business and had been actively ensuring that there are skilled and talented women in their actual salesforce as well. And it is not a surprise that many of these companies are reaping rich benefits from this move. Rather, this can be attributed as one of the secrets formulae behind the sudden success and growth of many such start-ups and marketing firms in the recent past.

The effect of COVID and how will it be affecting women working in the domain?

The sales and marketing sector will be witnessing a lot of change in approach pot the Pandemic. The way in which a customer needed to be approached, the way of pitching a product, and the way of understanding his or her needs will be now demanding a lot more of a psychological and sentimental approach than before. In this scenario, women, with their superior ability to understand others and involve in better market research, that is, to combine and integrate their thinking between the intuitive challenge of great qualitative research (understanding what is important to the consumer) and the analytical challenge of quantitative work (measuring how important the variables are) will turn out to be the X-Factor in this domain.

At the same time, it is also needed to be taken into consideration that nearly 2/3rd of the female workforce in marketing had either left the business or seriously considered doing so – be it permanently or temporarily – during the COVID, according to LinkedIn’s worldwide International Women’s Day (8 March) campaign. Also, they have been affected mostly with loss in pay and job expulsion implemented by many firms to reduce the impact of the Pandemic.

So, it is high time that the companies need to properly address and nourish their Women’s Salesforce and support them to do wonders in the business.

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