Cultural Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence in External and Internal Sales Relationships

Abstract

Increasingly, cultural diversity impacts the salesperson’s role. Whether involved in global sales, multinational team selling or navigating his/her organization, the salesperson today must be prepared to interact with a diverse workforce globally or domestically. The U.S. Census Bureau (2010) projects growth rates for the next decade at 26.3% for Asian Americans, 25.1% for Hispanics/Latin Americans and 12.1% for African Americans compared to a growth rate of 2.4% for Whites. These statistics coupled with the increasing globalization of work call for the importance of salespeople with cross-cultural and effective communication skills. This paper explores capabilities that can enhance the salesperson’s ability to effectively interact in any situation. We offer a series of propositions that associate a salesperson's intelligences and interactions with his/her performance. Specifically, cultural intelligence (Early and Ang 2003) and emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso 2008) are proposed as antecedents of a salesperson’s external (adaptive selling, Weitz, Sujan and Sujan, 1986) and internal (intraorganizational employee navigation, IEN, Plouffe and Grégoire 2011) interactions. Both adaptive selling and IEN have been shown to positively impact sales performance (Spiro and Weitz 1990, Plouffe and Grégorie).