What are the personality characteristics of a successful salesperson? This is an important question concerning the psychology of selling for managers who may be hiring salespeople. Being friendly, talkative, and empathetic would seem to be good attributes to have if you have a job in sales. Having these personality attributes may help you to achieve rapport with customers. However, it may seem less intuitive that a salesperson should like to engage in effortful thought. Need for cognition reflects a person's enjoyment of effortful thought. Would people who are high in need for cognition achieve higher sales performance?
Deeter-Schmelz and Sojka (2007) found that need for cognition was positively correlated with self-rated sale performance. In other words, people who were high in need for cognition, on the average, had higher self-rated sales performance than people who were low in need for cognition. (1)
Some sales situations may require effortful thought. Some customers may have challenging questions and objections in which there are no ready-made answers. Thus, it is possible that people who are high in need for cognition may be better able to address a customer's questions and objections in an effective manner.
However, we cannot make causal conclusions for this correlational finding. Other possible explanations for the finding cannot be ruled out.
In their study, the people rated their own sale performance. Thus, it is not clear whether a similar finding would be achieved if sale performance was rated by an supervisor. Nonetheless, it may be a good idea for a manger to consider an applicant's need for cognition in his or her hiring decisions for jobs involving sales. Need for cognition could be considered as part of the sales personality.
Notes
1. See their article for other findings.
References
Deeter-Schmelz, D. R., & Sojka, J. Z. (2007). Personality traits and sales
performance: Exploring differential effects of need for cognition and
self-monitoring. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 15, 145- 157.