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The selection and retention of effective salespeople fosters two divergent approaches. Some firms view salespeople as individuals with the "right" attributes, who can easily sell different products and move from firm to firm with little difficulty. Under this logic, firms are reluctant to devote resources towards salespeople's training and development. Others view sales as performance tasks that can be learned, devoting resources towards skills training and development. These divergent approaches have ramifications for human resource strategies, as firms design selection, training, retention and career development programs around their notion of the sale position and the individual who holds it. The stakes are high, as there is consistently higher variability in performance among salespeople than is seen in other fields (Hunter et al. , 1990), as well as higher turnover rates (Johnson et al. , 2000). Based on the premise that selling is a matter of learning, many firms utilize programs providing optimism and coping skills training (Dixon and Schertzer, 2005) to improve performance. Other firms simply attempt to identify those dispositionally suited to professional selling.
In choosing a side in this debate, two important questions must be addressed: First, can the essential components of sales truly be learned, or does a salesperson need to possess certain traits to succeed? If so, does the biological and heritable nature of traits shed light on this issue (DeYoung et al. , 2010)? Second, what personality-based, career-centered differences might we expect to see among salespeople? To address these questions, we conducted a latent profile analysis with several personality traits across 299 salespeople. Results revealed two clusters, who although similar along trainable attributes such as teamwork and customer service orientation, differed along the biologically based traits of optimism, emotional stability and extraversion, as well as along both job and career satisfaction. Thus, we contend that while certain aspects of sales can be learned, biologically based traits are crucial to intrinsic career success.
This paper is organized as follows: first, we discuss traits related to salesperson performance, noting how training and development have attempted to accommodate for inter-individual differences along these traits. Then, we review the linkages between these traits and job/career satisfaction. Following presentation of our results, we discuss the implications of our findings for salesforce selection and training. Our...