Business-to-business sales is a demanding line of work. Salespeople face constant rejection, tight quotas, long stretches away from the office, and the pressure to project cheerful confidence to clients even on their worst days. Add to that the reality that many sales floors remain demographically homogeneous, and it becomes easier to see why anxiety, isolation, and mental health struggles are so common among sales professionals.
A new study in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management asks whether efforts to build diverse and inclusive sales teams might do more than tick a corporate values box. The researchers wanted to know if such efforts could actually ease salespeople’s anxiety and loneliness, improve their mental health, and, in turn, help them sell more.
The question behind the research
Most previous research on workplace diversity and inclusion, often shortened to D&I, has focused on organization-wide outcomes like recruitment or leadership. What has been missing, according to the study’s authors, is a close look at how these efforts land on individual salespeople, particularly in the B2B world.
Nwamaka Anaza of Southern Illinois University Carbondale and her colleagues at Bellarmine University, Wayne State University, and the University of New Orleans set out to fill that gap. They wanted to treat D&I not as a checklist of separate programs but as a single overall climate that signals to workers whether they belong.
To ground their thinking, the authors drew on two long-standing ideas from social psychology. The first, similarity-attraction theory, holds that people gravitate toward others who seem like them in some way. The second, social identity theory, holds that people find psychological comfort by identifying with groups they view as valuable. Together, the researchers argued, these ideas suggest that inclusive environments help people find both one-on-one connections and a broader sense of group membership, both of which can buffer against feelings of isolation and dread.
How the study was conducted
Working with a global market research firm, the team surveyed 274 B2B salespeople across various roles, including outside sales, account management, business development, and sales management. Respondents were roughly 61% male and 39% female, and about 87% identified as Caucasian. Nearly all had spent time in college. Just under 18% had five years or fewer of sales experience, while the rest had six years or more.
Participants answered questions drawn from established scales measuring several things: their perceptions of diversity and inclusion at their workplace, their level of job-related anxiety, their sense of social loneliness at work, their overall mental health, and their contribution to sales outcomes such as hitting targets and landing major accounts. The researchers then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to test how these variables related to one another.
What the analysis showed
Salespeople who reported working in more diverse and inclusive environments also reported lower anxiety and less social loneliness. They rated their mental health more highly as well. And salespeople with better mental health tended to report stronger sales performance.
The size of the mental health link with D&I stood out. The statistical relationship was strong, suggesting that perceptions of an inclusive workplace and mental well-being tend to move together closely. Anxiety was also linked to worse mental health, though social loneliness, once anxiety was accounted for, did not show a statistically significant link with mental health in the model.
A follow-up analysis tested whether mental health helps explain the connection between D&I and sales performance. The results were consistent with that idea: inclusive climates were associated with better mental health, and better mental health was associated with stronger performance.
Experience changes the picture
One of the more striking findings involves career stage. The researchers examined whether the emotional benefits of D&I varied depending on how long someone had been in sales. They did.
For salespeople early in their careers, an inclusive climate was linked to substantially lower anxiety and loneliness. For more seasoned salespeople, the same climate had a much weaker effect. The authors interpret this pattern through their theoretical lens: newer salespeople are still figuring out where they fit, still leaning on peers and managers for guidance, and still building the client relationships that veterans already have in place. For them, signals of inclusion appear to matter more because they have fewer other sources of professional stability and belonging.
Experienced salespeople, by contrast, tend to have established accounts, established networks, and established legitimacy. The researchers suggest this may cushion them from some of the emotional turbulence that inclusive climates otherwise help address.
What it might mean for managers
The authors argue that their findings offer both a business case and a human case for D&I in sales organizations. Because the emotional benefits of inclusive climates appear strongest for newer salespeople, and because early-career turnover is a persistent problem in the profession, they suggest that D&I efforts may be particularly valuable as retention tools for younger hires.
The authors also point to a possible blind spot: if senior leaders themselves do not personally experience much of a boost from D&I efforts, they may underestimate how much those efforts matter to the people they are trying to recruit and keep. Structured mentorship programs, deliberate cross-tenure collaboration, and psychologically safe team environments are among the practical suggestions the authors offer.
Caveats worth keeping in mind
The study has limitations that the authors themselves flag. The sample skewed White and male, which they note reflects the demographics of many B2B sales forces but limits how broadly the findings can be applied. The data comes from salespeople reporting on their own perceptions and performance at a single point in time, so the study cannot establish that D&I causes better mental health or performance, only that these variables are linked in the ways described.
Some of the statistical fit measures for the model were within accepted ranges, but one, called RMSEA, was higher than ideal. The authors suggest this may reflect emotional well-being dimensions the study did not measure, such as depression, and they encourage future research to explore those.
The study also focuses on diversity and inclusion but not on equity, which involves fairness in how resources, territories, and promotions are distributed. The authors treat that as a separate question worth its own investigation. And because the study looks only at salespeople, not sales managers or executives, questions about how D&I plays out at the leadership level remain open.
