Salespeople and social awareness

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Persuasion/Selling

The 80/20 rule has become the ultimate justification for poor performance in sales. Sales management will often state phrases like, â€œeighty percent of our sales comes from twenty percent of our sales force.â€ These are very poor odds! It means that four out of every five sales people should be doing something else. How do so many smart executives and experienced sales managers make so many hiring mistakes?

The best salespeople have an innate ability to read body language and put it to profitable use. They adapt their presentation to the messages they pick up. Such messages are used constantly, even though people generally don’t realise they are communicating through their movements, posture and mannerisms.

Forty-three years ago, after devoting several years research into the problem of ineffective salespeople, David Mayer and Herbert Greenberg revealed the two basic qualities that any good salesperson must have: empathy and ego drive (aka D&E). Empathy, in this context, is the central ability to feel as other people do to sell them a product or service; a buyer who senses a salesperson’s empathy will provide him with valuable feedback, which will in turn facilitate the sale.

Why did the executives that Mayer and Greenberg studied continue to hire salespeople who did not have the ability to perform well? The companies were hindered in the pre-selection process by flaws in the prevailing forms of aptitude testing. Test takers could easily give answers they knew the test givers wanted to hear, in part because the tests sought to identify particular psychological traits rather than the personality type most capable of selling.

While sale training has evolved to keep pace with the new research findings on salespeople, sales tests have not. Recently, there has been significant popular and academic interest in the phenomenon of emotional intelligence (EI), an â€œability to monitor oneâ€™s own and othersâ€™ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide oneâ€™s thinking and actionsâ€.

However, EI tests are insufficient on their own to predict successful salespeople. They do not include the important traits of drive, energy, organisation and sociability. Research on empathy, non-verbal behaviour and emotion in organisations continues to grow and sales tests need to keep pace.

As an example of the continuing research, a recent study examined whether salespersons who more accurately read non-verbal emotional expressions were more successful. In Study 1, building-supply salespersons who were better at non-verbal emotion recognition earned higher average annual salary increases. Similarly, in Study 2, motor vehicle salespersons who were better at non-verbal emotion recognition sold more cars per month.

The results speak to the need for further exploration of skill-based assessments in the selection and development of salespersons.

Reference

Byron, K., Terranova, S., Nowick Jr., S. (2007). Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition and Salespersons: Linking Ability to Perceived and Actual Success. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37, 2600-2619.

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