GenderSell: How to Sell to the Opposite Sex

Citation

FitzGerald, M. (2000), "GenderSell: How to Sell to the Opposite Sex", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 455-466. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2000.17.5.455.2

The arrival of this new text is both welcome and timely, and pushes forward the barriers of personal selling into an area which should have been acknowledged decades ago. Over the years, many books and texts on personal selling have been written to serve the needs of practitioners and academics, but none of these – in this reviewer’s experience – has addressed the issue of inter‐gender communication in the modern sales relationship. This is odd, because men have been selling to women, and women to men, ever since time and markets began. Consider, for example, the seventeenth‐century housewife selling spun yarn to weavers and merchants, or the medieval goldsmith selling golden adornments to the wives of wealthy burghers and grandees. Yet perhaps western civilisation – in the rush for industrialised wealth – has temporarily forgotten the lessons of our forebears. The Industrial Revolution efficiently squeezed women from the general marketplace and only in recent decades have we seen them regain their rightful place in modern markets as both vendors and consumers. That marketplace has naturally changed to suit modern twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century living, and the inter‐gender vending skills of our forebears need to be re‐learned. Thus Tingley and Lee’s book fills the gap as the need to understand the differences between men and women in personal selling roles has arisen because women have re‐entered the world of work in large numbers, and Tingley and Lee’s book offers a simple and accessible means of doing this.

The book first introduces and explains why gender‐interaction is an issue in selling and buying, and effectively sets the scene for the following ten chapters. It notes that throughout this century selling has been done by men to male buyers, and thus skills, techniques, training approaches, etc., have developed to manage male‐to‐male interaction effectively. However, the recent advent of women into buying roles and their different approach to buying have made it necessary for salesmen to adapt and change. Similarly, the increase in the numbers of women achieving success in the previously all‐male world of selling also requires them to understand and adapt to professional gender differences when selling to male buyers.

Chapter 1 focuses on the differences between men and women as consumers, and how their needs and approaches may differ. Chapter 2 explores the sources of gender‐based difference and their interaction in communication – and introduces the concept of a selling approach adapted to meet the gendered needs of modern buyers and sellers. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respectively with what salesmen need to consider if they are to influence women buyers, and how saleswomen can more effectively influence sales to male buyers. Chapter 5 helps the reader to review his/her own gender‐based approach to selling to the opposite sex and gain insights into how it may hamper success, whilst Chapter 6 offers practical guidance on how those insights can be harnessed for better and more effective management of the sales process from initial contact to close, and beyond. Chapter 7 reveals the needs of the buyer from a gender perspective, and Chapters 8 and 9 cover formal presentation and methods of closing. The last chapter deals with the gender‐based complexities of selling to couples and helps the salesperson to avoid stereotyped role assumptions.

The secret of success in selling is to understand the needs of each customer and to present your own offering to meet those specified needs. This reviewer learned this lesson early in her sales career with Xerox and applied it (to mostly male customers!) well enough to develop a highly successful pre‐academic career. It is a fundamental tenet of personal selling that if one does not know what the customer is seeking, achieving a sale is a hit and miss affair. Thus, understanding customer needs is the single most important thing any salesperson can do – be they male or female. Whilst this book deals exceptionally well with the ins‐and‐outs of gender interaction in selling, it takes too long to get to the essential issue of understanding buyer needs (Chapter 7) and, when it does, it does not adequately deal with the fact that understanding the way an individual buyer operates (male or female) is integral to the need‐discovering process as a whole. Whilst the buyer’s gender can be an important influence on the way a buyer does business, it is not the only factor to affect his or her behaviour – as Webster and Wind (1972) have revealed – and understanding the complex web of product‐specific needs, corporate policies, and a buyer’s personal reference point is the key to any successful relationship between vendor and buyer.

It is the ability of a salesperson to grasp and run with these complexities which makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful salespeople, and this book does not adequately put the gender interaction between vendor and buyer in context. However, gender in business interaction is frequently forgotten in modern marketing even though research reveals it to be the most significant demographic influence in commercial exchanges (FitzGerald and Arnott, 1996).

GenderSell is an exciting, useful and practical book. It is sprinkled throughout with interesting and colourful examples of sales won and lost through inappropriate gender interaction, and makes it easy for the salesperson to identify with the men and women in the examples and their dilemmas, worries and concerns. Personal selling is a hard, tough world, and this book provides insight and explanation of issues faced daily by the personal seller.

As such, this book should be required reading for all salespeople, sales managers, and Vice‐Presidents and Presidents alike – regardless of their gender. Not least, even buyers would benefit from a dip into its pages – if only to understand how to manage opposite‐sex vendor relationships more effectively!Just as pertinently, it is highly recommended for use by sales trainers who could usefully develop a respectable module for basic training courses.

Academics, too, could add value and relevance to their teaching by including the ideas put forward by Tingley and Lee in their lectures on personal selling and buyer behaviour. Certainly, their ideas provide a rich seam for much‐needed research in an area which has generally been ignored by mainstream marketing academics. Could this be because – to date – most academic research in personal selling and marketing has been undertaken by men?