Applying EI in Marketing Exchanges:An Approach towards Optimizing Sales Performance

Abstract

This research tries to highlight few insights about how sales experts employ emotions in marketing exchanges to facilitate optimistic result for their businesses, themselves, and their clientele. The authors conducted three field studies to observe the impact of emotional intelligence (EI) in marketing exchanges on sales performance and customer associations. EI was found to be absolutely related to performance of real estate and insurance agents, even when controlling for the effects of domain-general EI, self report EI, cognitive ability, and several control variables. Sales experts with higher EI are not only more profit producers but are also better at retaining customers. Additionally, the authors demonstrated that EI interacts with key marketing exchange variables - customer orientation and manifest influence - to heighten performance such that high EI salespeople more effectively employ customer-oriented selling and influence customer decisions. Finally, results indicate a balancing relationship between EI and cognitive ability. EI positively influences performance at higher levels of cognitive ability. These findings have implications for improving interactions between buyers and sellers and for employee selection and training.