Your Best Marketer Is Probably a Machiavellian. That's Not the Insult You Think It Is.

Every profession is a personality filter. The job doesn't just attract people who can do the work. It attracts people whose psychology is drawn to what the work is. B2B marketing and enterprise sales are no exception. When you look at what personality science actually says about who ends up in these roles and why, the picture is more uncomfortable, and more useful, than most org charts would suggest.

The traits that make your best marketers effective are the same ones Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a handbook about in 1513. The instincts that make your top sales reps close are the ones clinical psychologists file under narcissism. This isn't name-calling. It's personality research, replicated across decades. And understanding it changes how you think about your team, your buyers, and the invisible dynamics shaping every deal in your pipeline.

Two frameworks you should know: OCEAN and the Dark Triad

Two models from personality psychology do most of the heavy lifting here.

The first is the Big Five, known by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. It's the most empirically validated model of personality in the field: decades of research, replicated across cultures, predictive of everything from job performance to relationship stability (Goldberg, 1993; McCrae & Costa, 1997).

The second is the Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. These aren't clinical diagnoses. They're personality dimensions: traits everyone carries to some degree, measured on a continuum (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Where OCEAN describes how people generally behave, the Dark Triad describes how they strategise, compete, and pursue what they want when the stakes are high.

Both models, applied to the B2B marketing and sales floor, reveal patterns that are hiding in plain sight.

What enterprise sales selects for

Every sales leader knows the archetype: charismatic, competitive, relentless, thick-skinned. What they might not know is how precisely personality psychology has mapped it.

Barrick and Mount's 1991 meta-analysis, covering over 23,000 participants, established that Extraversion and Conscientiousness are the two strongest personality predictors of sales performance. Salespeople need the social energy to initiate and sustain conversations and the discipline to follow through on process and pipeline.

But here's where it gets less flattering. Agreeableness, the trait associated with warmth, cooperation, and concern for others, tends to be lower in high-performing salespeople. That's not a coincidence. A highly agreeable person struggles with the fundamental act of selling: asking someone to do something that might make them uncomfortable. They avoid conflict. They accommodate. They discount early because the tension of negotiation feels like a personal failing.

The best closers aren't disagreeable in a social sense. They're often excellent company. But their psychological wiring makes them comfortable with a dynamic most people avoid: holding your position while the other person isn't happy about it.

Then there's the Dark Triad. Jonason, Slomski, and Partyka's 2012 research found that Dark Triad traits predict a preference for careers involving social influence, competition, and dominance. Sound like any job descriptions you've written recently?

Narcissism has a complicated relationship with sales performance. A degree of narcissistic confidence, the unshakeable belief that you are the person who can close this deal, is genuinely useful. It powers the cold outreach that would paralyse someone more self-doubting. It makes rejection feel like a temporary error in the universe's judgement rather than a personal verdict.

The catch: narcissistic salespeople tend to burn brighter and shorter. They over-promise. They under-invest in relationships that don't feed their ego. Magnificent in month one. A liability by month six.

And here's the finding that nobody running a sales floor wants to hear. Adam Grant's 2013 research at Wharton, published in Psychological Science, found that the salespeople who consistently outperform aren't the most extraverted at all. They're ambiverts, people near the middle of the extraversion spectrum, who can push when needed and listen when needed. Pure extraverts were only marginally more effective than pure introverts.

The sales floor selects for extraversion and narcissistic confidence. The research says what it actually needs is something more nuanced. Nobody's rewriting the job ad.

What B2B marketing selects for, and why it's darker than you'd think

Marketing is different. And in some ways, darker.

The trait most consistently associated with marketing professionals is Openness to Experience: creativity, intellectual curiosity, comfort with ambiguity. Marketers score high here for obvious reasons. The work demands constant novelty: new campaigns, new angles, new ways to frame the same product for the fourth quarter running. People low in Openness don't last, because the work itself is a relentless demand for reinvention.

Conscientiousness matters less in marketing than in sales or finance (there is no polite way to say this to a campaign manager chasing a deadline, but the research bears it out). Marketing's relationship with structure is, shall we say, flexible. Ask a marketer whether they've updated the project plan and watch the creativity kick in.

But it's the Dark Triad profile that gets really interesting.

Richard Christie, the Columbia University psychologist who developed the Mach-IV scale in the 1970s, defined Machiavellianism as a personality orientation characterised by strategic thinking, emotional detachment in decision-making, and a pragmatic willingness to influence others. Not cruelty. Not dishonesty. A calm, clear-eyed focus on what works.

Hunt and Chonko's 1984 study, published in the Journal of Marketing, tested marketing professionals against the general population on Christie's scale and found them scoring meaningfully higher. The core finding has been debated since, but the observation holds: marketing, as a profession, disproportionately attracts people who are comfortable with influence, comfortable with strategic ambiguity, and comfortable constructing narratives designed to shape how other people think.

This shouldn't surprise anyone who's actually done the job. Marketing is influence. Every campaign is an exercise in shaping perception. Every piece of positioning is an argument built to move someone toward a conclusion you chose in advance. Every "thought leadership" article (including this one) is a carefully constructed attempt to reframe how you think about something.

If that's not Machiavellian, it's at least in the same postcode.

The useful distinction is between Machiavellianism as a trait and Machiavellianism as a pathology. As a trait, it's strategic intelligence: the ability to read a room, anticipate objections, craft a message that lands. As a pathology, it's manipulation without regard for consequence. Most good B2B marketers live firmly in trait territory. They influence with skill and, mostly, with integrity.

But the same psychological wiring that makes them brilliant at positioning is the wiring that, unchecked, produces the misleading case study. The cherry-picked statistic. The landing page that's technically true and fundamentally dishonest.

Every marketing leader has felt that line blur. The moment the campaign narrative starts bending reality rather than reflecting it. The point where "framing" becomes "spin" and nobody quite says so.

The job titles that tell on themselves

Map personality psychology against common B2B job titles and the patterns are almost too on the nose.

The SDR. High extraversion, moderate narcissism, low neuroticism. You need someone who can make fifty cold calls a day and not internalise the rejection. The role literally selects for people who don't take things personally, which is either emotional resilience or a slight disconnect, depending on where you stand.

The Enterprise Account Executive. Extraversion moderated by strategic patience. Lower agreeableness than the SDR. The stakes are higher, the negotiations harder. A touch of Machiavellianism that shows up as "executive presence" in the performance review but functions as the ability to manage complex stakeholder dynamics without saying the quiet part out loud.

The CMO. High Openness, high narcissism. You need genuine belief that your vision for the brand is the right one, held against pressure from sales, product, and the board simultaneously. Conscientiousness is variable. The best CMOs pair visionary Openness with operational discipline. The worst are pure Openness with no Conscientiousness: brilliant strategists who can't ship.

The Content Strategist. High Openness, high Agreeableness. They care, perhaps too much, about the reader. Lower on Dark Triad traits, which makes them the moral conscience of the marketing department and simultaneously the person most likely to have their work rewritten by someone further up the Machiavellian scale.

The Growth Hacker. High Openness, low Agreeableness, elevated Machiavellianism. The job title is itself a Machiavellian act. "Hacker" implies scrappy ingenuity. The reality is often a person who runs aggressive A/B tests and doesn't worry too much about the experience of the 50% stuck in the worse-performing variant.

VP of Sales. This is where the narcissism peaks. Not because all VPs of Sales are narcissists, but because the role demands a public performance of confidence that selects for people comfortable providing it. Babiak and Hare's research on psychopathic traits in corporate leadership (Snakes in Suits, 2006) found that senior leadership roles attract elevated Dark Triad profiles at three to four times the base rate in the general population. The VP of Sales, sitting at the intersection of leadership, competition, and commission, is ground zero.

None of this makes any of these people bad at their jobs. Often the opposite. The personality traits that sound alarming in a psychology textbook are the exact traits that make someone effective in the role. The Machiavellian marketer is the one who produces the most persuasive campaigns. The narcissistic sales leader is the one who believes in the deal when everyone else has walked away.

The problem isn't that these traits exist. It's that nobody talks about them, even though they're shaping every campaign, every pitch, and every deal.

Why the buyer's personality matters more than yours

Here's where this stops being an entertaining taxonomy of your colleagues and starts being genuinely useful.

If your marketing and sales teams are personality-filtered, so are your buyers. The CFO you're selling to didn't become a CFO by accident. They carry a personality profile that selected them for that role just as surely as your Openness and Machiavellianism selected you for marketing.

CFOs, as a group, tend toward high Conscientiousness (detail, process, risk assessment) and lower Openness. They are not here for your "reimagining of the enterprise landscape." Neuroticism varies, but the successful ones have learned to channel anxiety into vigilance rather than paralysis. They are not a natural audience for high-Openness, Machiavellian marketing. Which is exactly what most B2B marketing produces.

CTOs tend toward higher Openness. They're drawn to new technology, novel architectures, but paired with high Conscientiousness because they need to ship. They respond to intellectual stimulation wrapped in practical credibility. The campaign that works on a CTO often fails on a CFO, and vice versa. Not because the product is wrong, but because the personality at the other end processes information differently.

Gartner's research puts the average B2B buying committee at 11 to 13 stakeholders. Each with a different role. Each with a different personality profile shaped by that role. Each processing your content through a different psychological lens.

When every stakeholder gets the same campaign, the same nurture sequence, the same messaging, you're not just failing at personalisation. You're failing at basic personality psychology. You're sending Machiavellian messaging to a Conscientious audience. High-Openness creative to people who score high on Neuroticism and just want reassurance that nothing will go wrong.

The personality mismatch between who creates the content and who receives it is one of the most expensive blind spots in B2B marketing. And almost nobody is looking at it.

The mirror you didn't ask for

There's a final uncomfortable insight in the research. The Dark Triad isn't just a description of who ends up in B2B marketing and sales. It's a mirror.

The reason marketers produce content that sounds like it was written by someone who understands the audience but hasn't done the deeper work? Machiavellianism: the instinct to construct a persuasive surface without necessarily doing the investigation underneath.

The reason sales reps push deals that aren't right for the buyer? Narcissistic confidence overriding the signal that the prospect isn't a good fit.

The reason "growth at all costs" strategies keep getting funded? The psychopathic dimension: a willingness to deprioritise long-term consequences in favour of short-term results.

None of this is destiny. Personality traits are tendencies, not sentences. But understanding what you're naturally inclined toward is the first step toward deciding when to lean in and when to override.

The best marketers I've worked with aren't the ones who score lowest on the Dark Triad. They're the ones who know where they sit on it, and build systems that keep the shadowy parts in check while putting the useful parts to work. Strategic thinking without manipulation. Confidence without delusion. Pragmatism without recklessness.

Where this thinking lives

We built Ada around the conviction that understanding the person on the other end of your content isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between content that resonates and content that gets deleted.

That understanding starts with psychology. Not personas. Not job titles. The actual cognitive and personality-level architecture of the person you're trying to reach. What drives a Conscientious CFO is different from what drives an Open CTO, and both are different from what moves the Agreeable procurement lead who'll kill your deal quietly because they couldn't say no to an internal stakeholder with a louder voice.

Personality science has spent decades mapping these patterns. Most B2B marketing hasn't even started using them.

Your campaign was built by Machiavellians. Your sales team is powered by narcissists. Your buyer is none of those things, or all of them, and the only way to know is to do the work of understanding before you write a single word.

And before you start diagnosing your colleagues: I spent three days writing this article about how marketing attracts Machiavellians, using every Machiavellian technique in the book. The framework doesn't spare the person holding the pen.

Written by Jonathon Bates, Co-Founder, Ada Create.