In the Gong Research Labs series, we publish data from analyzing sales calls with natural language processing and AI. Subscribe here for new data every week.

—

A new batch of sales conversation analysis may suggest that men listen to men more than they listen to women during sales calls.

When men sell to woman buyers, their “talk-to-listen ratio” skyrockets in favor of more talking. They also engage in longer stretches of uninterrupted speaking — something we call “monologues.”

If you know anything about Gong.io, you know that we get our kicks from analyzing anonymized sales conversations with AI so we can publish the data in an effort to bring science to the art of the sales conversation.

Our data science team took their analytical superpowers to a large pool of B2B sales call recordings (all pulled anonymously from similar software-as-a-service companies), picking apart what happens on sales calls with different buyer/seller gender combinations:

Men selling to women

Women to men

Women to women

Men to men

We’re here to present the data rather than form conclusions, but the patterns may make you wonder. Either way, it's good to take a lighthearted view of this stuff :)

Do Men “Listen” to Men More Than Women?

When saleswomen sell to men, they have pretty close to what we consider the ideal talk-to-listen ratio:

Now let’s flip the gender pairing. When men sell to women buyers, their talk ratio is 27% higher than when women sell to men. It’s not just an incremental difference; it’s a quantum leap:

You might conclude that men are just more chatty than women are (who knows, maybe that’s the case). But then, what would explain the (very) low talk-to-listen ratio when men sell to men?

Said another way, men speak 28% less when they are selling men than when they are selling to women. That’s the lowest talk-to-listen ratio of all the gender combinations.

The most interesting thing about this data is that men’s talk-to-listen ratios are significantly different depending on the gender they’re selling to, while women hold a fairly constant talk-to-listen ratio regardless of the gender they’re selling to:

Women Sellers:

Men Sellers:

Enough about the talk-to-listen ratio. Let’s look at a different data point.

Men “Get On Their Soapbox” When Selling to Women

The next data point may suggest that "mansplaining" is a real thing...

We measured the average monologues by gender combination. By “monologue,” I mean how long a person speaks for an uninterrupted period of time.

When men sold to other men in this dataset, their average monologue was 91 seconds long. When men sold to women, it was 108 seconds long — a full 17 seconds longer on average.

Again, not a small change. It’s a sharp behavioral pattern.

Women Have Higher Conversion Rates

Despite (or more likely because of) these behavioral patterns, women — on average — have higher conversion rates than men do (both in terms of securing the next meeting and closing the deal).

While one interpretation of this could be exactly what the title of this article suggests, it could also be interpreted in many other ways. Hey, I'm just here to show the data :)

The only viable way to understand what’s going on is to observe live sales calls or listen to sales call recordings while these behaviors are happening. The data simply serve as a barometer to point us in the right direction for qualitative investigation.

For now, write your observations in the comments below, and tag a friend in the comments who may find this interesting.



