Individual Salesperson Research Articles

A multidimensional approach to motivating salespeople

A multidimensional approach has been recognized as a superior method for motivating the individual worker [28]. Until recently, researchers made few systematic attempts to operationalize such an approach. Instead, the bulk of the research effort was expended on examining the efficacy of various types of rewards in motivating salespeople. Some researchers proposed that monetary rewards were the primary motivators of sales effort [ 11, 30, 341; while others suggested that psychological incentives (e.g., recognition, personal growth) were also important in motivating salespeople [5, 81. A number of different measuring instruments for job satisfaction has recently evolved [ 161. One, INDSALES used for measuring industrial job satisfaction, has been proposed [7]. Scores obtained from this instrument however, fail to provide the required data for designing motivational techniques. The scores are lopsided to the degree that the manager cannot determine the individual level of satisfaction wanted since the satisfaction scores were not appraised against standards set by the individual salesperson. The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, to discuss a multidimensional approach to motivation; second to

The Role of Real Estate Agents as Information Mediators in two American Cities

Real estate salespersons in the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area and in Minneapolis and its suburbs were surveyed in order to document the existence of any spatial bias the recommendations they make to prospective home buyers. Any such bias, it is argued, acts as a constraint to the information field and therefore also to the search space of such households. It was found that although the consensus of real estate salespersons concerning neighborhoods “appropriate” for four household types was largely in accord with the actual distribution of such households within the two metropolitan areas, that individual responses showed highly limited patterns of information and preference. Even when given the opportunity to recommend areas anywhere within the metropolitan area in a hypothetical, non-sales situation, individual salespersons centered their recommendations on those areas in which they are most active in the selling and listing of houses. The size and complexity of the metropolitan setting do seem to affect the strength of these tendencies, but even in a medium-sized, relatively homogeneous setting, there exists a localized pattern of realtor information. In general, those households which are dependent on realty salesmen for information on neighborhood characteristics are making use of a highly structured and spatially limited information source.

The Role of Real Estate Agents as Information Mediators in Two American Cities

Real estate salespersons in the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area and in Minneapolis and its suburbs were surveyed in order to document the existence of any spatial bias the recommendations they make to prospective home buyers. Any such bias, it is argued, acts as a constraint to the information field and therefore also to the search space of such households. It was found that although the consensus of real estate salespersons concerning neighborhoods “appropriate” for four household types was largely in accord with the actual distribution of such households within the two metropolitan areas, that individual responses showed highly limited patterns of information and preference. Even when given the opportunity to recommend areas anywhere within the metropolitan area in a hypothetical, non-sales situation, individual salespersons centered their recommendations on those areas in which they are most active in the selling and listing of houses. The size and complexity of the metropolitan setting do seem to affect the strength of these tendencies, but even in a medium-sized, relatively homogeneous setting, there exists a localized pattern of realtor information. In general, those households which are dependent on realty salesmen for information on neighborhood characteristics are making use of a highly structured and spatially limited information source.

An Evaluation of Department Store Salespeople by the Interaction Chronograph

THE selection of department store salespeople has always been largely a matter of guesswork and the judgment of the employment department. Various testing methods have been tried in the past and the general conclusion has been that little benefit was to be derived from any of them. The results of these attempts have had little more than the slightest statistical confirmation. The correlations found would never warrant any great dependence on any testing procedure as a means of selection. This article is a report of the results of an evaluation of the sales personnel of the Gilchrist Company in Boston by means of the Interaction Chronograph, whose results are in extremely high agreement with individual sales performance. So high was this agreement that within departments with equal opportunity the graphs showed a simple linear relationship between the Interaction Chronograph measurements and the average sales of the individual salesperson. The success of this method among almost 300 salespeople may be due to its approach which is entirely different from that of the usual pencil and paper tests. It measures the salesperson's behaviour in units of time. It does this by recording certain behavioural characteristics of an individual during an interview with a member of the personnel department. The behaviour recorded is the response pattern-the speech and gestures of each individual. What is measured is ;he timing of these patterns-how long each person in the contact talks and is silent, and the synchronization-when each one interrupts and how long he fails to respond. Thus the machine makes it possible to measure the person's activity or drive, his tempo of acting, his initiative, dominance, and capacity to adjust to others, as these characteristics actually occur and not as they might be inferred from what is said in the interview or from answers on a written test.