To Be or Not to Be… Does the Level of Empathy Contribute to Successful Personal Selling?

Abstract

The field of sales represents an important aspect of business whether in monetary or in strategic terms (Darmon, 2008; Futrell, 2013). For that reason, researchers have examined a number of salesperson traits that affect sales performance (Churchill, Ford, Hartley, & Walker, 1985; Johnston & Marshall, 2013). While many researchers have postulated a positive relationship between empathy and sales performance, few have undertaken empirical testing of such a relationship. Those who have done such empirical investigations have come up with mixed results as some have found a positive relationship (Greenberg & Mayer, 1964; Tobolski & Kerr, 1952), others have found no relationship (Dawson, Soper, & Pettijohn, 1992; Lamont & Lundstrom, 1977), a negative relationship (McBane, 1995) or a partial relationship (Spiro & Weitz, 1990). This situation seems all the more surprising because the selling processes proposed in the literature integrate the determination of the purchasers’ needs and feelings a series of clearly structured stages (Zoltners, Sinha, & Zoltners, 2013).