Improving Personal Sales Performance by Considering Customer Personality Traits

Abstract

The advantages of adaptive selling have been widely
studied before but not from the viewpoint of customer
personality traits. Therefore, the aim of this article is to find out
how to improve personal sales performance by considering
customer personality traits. This was examined from the
perspective of both salespeople (n=5) and customers (n=955). The
results showed that salespeople use adaptive techniques
randomly and often subconsciously. Nevertheless, they can read
the level of customer extraversion and conscientiousness quite
well and adapt their sales approach accordingly. However,
coping with customer agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to
experiences is much more complicated, and some customer
behaviors are misread by salespeople. Therefore, some ideas on
how to incorporate verbal and non-verbal communication
techniques are proposed to improve sales performance.