Give Me Five for Productive Staffing

You’ve less influence over the personalities of shoppers entering your store than you do over the personalities of staff you’ve selected and coached to be order getters, not just order takers. So attending to sales staff personalities can pay off.
     Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev used the Big Five to describe characteristics of salespeople who are best at persuading a range of customers. The Big Five, widely popular among psychologists, is a schema of fundamental personality dimensions:

• Extroverted: Talkative, outgoing, animated 
• Open to Experience: Curious, insightful, creative 
• Conscientious: Ambitious, careful, dependable 
• Agreeable: Kind, sympathetic, collaborative 
• Emotionally Stable: Self-confident, calm, poised 

     The researchers found that, in general, people who are extraverted and open to experience are more persuasive. These personality traits played the greatest role when the target of persuasion had low involvement, such as what would be true with routine purchase decisions.
     A set of researchers, at Manhattan College, used the Big Five to assess another set of characteristic of desirable employees. They saw an association between high conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower rates of workplace theft, absenteeism, tardiness, and on-the-job uncooperativeness.
     As for emotional stability, its value for productive staffing is best seen by considering the name psychologists chose to label the other end of this fifth dimension. The name is “Neurotic,” and the descriptors include anxious and impulsive.
     People tend to maintain their positions on the Big Five dimensions throughout their adult lives, so what the researchers found plays more importance in selecting sales staff than in coaching sales staff. Still, for sales staff already in place, cultivating changes could make a difference.
     A larger difference is likely to occur with coaching by building Customer Need Knowledge (CNK). Researchers at Germany’s University of Mannheim and University of Bochum explored the relationships of:

• CNK, defined as the extent to which a frontline employee in a store—the one who serves customers face-to-face—accurately and promptly identifies each customer’s needs and desires 
• Customers’ satisfaction with their experiences with the frontline employee 
• Customer judgments of value in what they purchased from the frontline employee 

     The researchers found that when the CNK of employees in a store is higher, customers are more satisfied and say they’ve gotten better value from their purchases. Employee with high CNK pay close attention to each customer they’re with and are visibly concerned with the problems of that customer.

For your success: Retailer’s Edge: Boost Profits Using Shopper Psychology

Click below for more: 
Prefer Order Getters to Order Takers
Assess for Employee Integrity Honestly
Prevail Using Customer Need Knowledge
Never End Staff Recruitment