Men talk more than women in the sales profession and it doesn't serve them, research shows

There's a cultural stereotype that says that women talk a lot while men are stoic, silent and annoyed with all that female chatter.

Another cultural stereotype is something called "mansplaining" - when a man pontificates to a woman.

And now a startup called Gong has research that shows that the first stereotype isn't quite true for saleswoman but the second is, sadly, more true for salesmen. And when these men slip into mansplaining, it truly doesn't serve them.

Gong records sales calls and video conferences, transcribes them, matches them with sales outcomes and uses AI to analyze what makes a salesperson successful. The idea is to coach salespeople into closing more deals.

Gong analyzed 519,000 sales calls and discovered that the average monologue of male salespeople to female buyers was significantly longer (108 seconds) than the average monologue to a man (91 seconds). In other words, men talked for longer periods of uninterrupted time when selling to women. All told, when salesmen worked with female buyers, the men did 61% of the talking.

And when the buyer was male, the buyer spoke more, both when talking to saleswomen and to salesmen. The male buyer talked 56% of the time to another man and 52% of the time to a woman.

When sales women talked to other women, the salesperson talked 51% of the time and listened 49%.

But the clincher is: the saleswomen closed more deals. Saleswomen closed 70% of the time when selling to a man, 72% of the time when selling to a woman. Salesmen closed 68% to women and 67% to men.

The ideal ratio for closing deals across all male/female combinations is 52% listening 48% talking, Gong counsels.

Moral of the story: it pays to speak up, but only if you also listen up.