Emotional Intelligence in Marketing Exchanges

Abstract

This research examines how sales professionals use emotions in marketing exchanges to facilitate positive outcomes for their firms, themselves, and their customers. The authors conduct three field studies to examine the impact of emotional intelligence (EI) in marketing exchanges on sales performance and customer relationships. They find that EI is positively related to performance of real estate and insurance agents, even when controlling for the effects of domain-general EI, self-report EI, cognitive ability, and several control variables. Sales professionals with higher EI are not only superior revenue generators but also better at retaining customers. In addition, the authors demonstrate that EI interacts with key marketing exchange variables-customer orientation and manifest influence-to heighten performance such that high-EI salespeople more effectively employ customer-oriented selling and influence customer decisions. Finally, the results indicate a complementary relationship between EI and cognitive ability in that EI positively influences performance at higher levels of cognitive ability. These findings have implications for improving interactions between buyers and sellers and for employee selection and training.

Social Networks within Sales Organizations: Their Development and Importance for Salesperson Performance

“…Specifically, if political skill doesn't impact positional centrality, what about other skill-or behavior-based variables like intraorganizational navigation (e.g., Plouffe and Grégoire 2011) and emotional intelligence (e.g., Kidwell et al 2011)? Future research should seek to identify something other than a fixed personality trait (i.e., which managers would perhaps best account for as a hiring decision) that can drive positional, as well as relational, centrality and other advantageous network positions.…”

How Do Salespeople Make Decisions? The Role of Emotions and Deliberation on Adaptive Selling, and the Moderating Role of Intuition

“…In the marketing literature, emotions have, for some time, been considered an important influence on the cognitive process (Bagozzi, Belschak, & Verbeke, ; Bagozzi, Gopinath, & Nyer, ). EI is described as “ability to acquire and apply knowledge from one's emotions and those of others to produce beneficial outcomes” (Kidwell et al., , p. 78). EI is distinct from other related constructs such as IQ (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenios, ) and personality (Law, Wong, & Song, ; Mayer et al., ), and has a positive relationship with job satisfaction and job performance (Lassk & Shepherd, ; Lopes, Grewal, Kadis, Gall, & Salovey, ; Sy, Tram, & O'Hara, ; Wong & Law, ).…”

“…The classic expected utility model of decision making assumes that people choose an option through a deliberative process (Glöcker & Witteman, ; Savage, ; von Neumann & Morgenstern, ). Recent research shows that emotions do influence decisions (Volz & von Cramon, ) and that there is a complementary relationship between cognitive and emotional ability (Kidwell et al., ). A salesperson's ability to think rationally and deliberately is one of his/her strongest talents.…”

“…In order to achieve their goals, salespeople must manage emotions and stay focused during customer interactions. In these engagements, if emotional reactions are too high, salespeople run the risk of losing credibility with their clients (Kidwell et al., ). The emotional regulation process allows an individual to “induce and sustain a positive affective state” that empowers the individual with “more cognitive resources to devote to task performance,” thereby enabling one to engage in a more effective strategy (Butler et al., ; Joseph & Newman, , p. 56).…”

“…During the last few decades, practitioners and academics have established the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) in explaining human exchanges and performance (Cherniss, Extein, Goleman, & Weissberg, 2006;Grandey, 2000;Kidwell et al, 2011;Law, Wong, & Song, 2004;Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008;Rozell, Pettijohn, & Parker, 2004). In the marketing literature, emotions have, for some time, been considered an important influence on the cognitive process (Bagozzi, Belschak, & Verbeke, 2010;Bagozzi, Gopinath, & Nyer, 1999).…”