An interdisciplinary approach to assessing the characteristics and sales potential of modern salespeople Peter A. Reday a , Roger Marshall b, ⁎, A. Parasuraman c a Department of Marketing, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555, USA b Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1020, New Zealand c University of Miami, Florida, USA abstract article info Article history: Received 1 July 2004 Received in revised form 1 June 2008 Accepted 1 August 2008 Available online 26 September 2008 Keywords: Sales success Prediction Personality Technology transfer Salespersons' characteristics Technology is becoming increasingly pervasive in industrial markets. So too are the necessary attributes of salespeople in this context changing, to require not only the typical selling skills of persuasion and tact, and the interpersonal skills usually considered relevant in consumer markets, but also the technical skills associated with technology transfer. The research reported here investigates these three aspects, and measures their influence on actual sales performance in a business-to-business context. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Successful salespeople are adept at identifying consumer needs and supplying a solution that helps provide for them; this role has remained constant from the development of modern sales concepts to the present day. The environment in which salespeople operate has changed dramatically in the past few decades, though, with technological advances impinging dramatically on almost every corner of our lives, and thus the sales environment. Yet, in spite of this change, the academic sales literature is largely devoid of research that specifically addresses the subject of technology transfer when examining the characteristics of effective salespeople. There is a wide literature on the characteristics of salespeople in general, but the traits modern salespeople may require to become successful must surely include some form of technology transference skill as well as the more typical traits of credibility and persuasion. The research reported here takes the traditional way of assessing the potential success of sales personnel and adds to it concepts (and their measurement) taken from technology transfer field. In addition, the opinion leader concept from consumer psychology is added, as this concept is technology- independent and thus possession of opinion leadership traits may provide an additional, stable indicator of success even within a technical, business-to-business, sales environment. Much of the literature since the early 1990s regarding selection of new sales employees has used the “Big Five” personality character- istics—neuroticism (or emotional stability), extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (Barrick & Mount, 1991). The literature on effective sales performance is no different in that it also contains many references to the fact that salespeople must have the characteristics of persuasiveness, tact and competitiveness (Brown, Cron, & Slocum, 1998; Spence, Helmereich, & Pred, 1987) and, occasionally, aggressiveness (Honeycutt & Ford, 1996). However, both industrial and consumer markets increasingly involve high levels of technology that may call for additional skills and attributes, beyond those associated with the traditional sales function, required to transfer the technology embodied within so many products and services to their clients. Business academics have researched and reported the character- istics of successful business-to-business salespeople for many years; the following section first reviews this work. In order to round out these attributes—in the light of the increasingly technology-intensive environment of modern salespeople—this review will also present the characteristics of Opinion Leaders, from the consumer behavior literature, and those of Technology Linkers, taken from the technology transfer literature. The intersection of these three domains will yield a more realistic assessment of the full set of characteristics required to assure success in sales in a modern marketing context. Industrial Marketing Management 38 (2009) 838–844 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Pareday@ysu.edu (P.A. Reday), roger.marshall@aut.ac.nz (R. Marshall), parsu@miami.edu (A. Parasuraman). 0019-8501/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2008.08.001 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Marketing Management