Relationship of Collegiate Resiliency and Personality Traits to Early Career Success in Professional Sales
The sophistication and business acumen needed by professional salespeople continues to rise. Many business-to-business organizations now require a college degree for entry-level sales positions. Universities, aware that the intersection of strong demand for sales talent with a limited supply of qualified candidates is problematic for organizations, are addressing the situation by increasing sales course offerings and formalizing sales education programs (Deeter-Schmelz & Kennedy, 2011). This action is generating meaningful success: The Society for Human Resource Management (2016) reports 34% of organizations selected ‘collaborating with education institutions’ with sales programs as their most effective recruiting strategy.
Despite these efforts, filling sales representative positions remains problematic. In 2018 sales positions were the second hardest-to-fill job, continuing on the top 10 list of hardest-to-fill jobs for 12 consecutive years (Manpower 2018). The situation is not getting better: ninety percent of hiring managers report increasing challenges in recruiting and hiring sales professionals (Impartner 2018). This challenge in recruiting coupled with the forecast of a need for 100,000 new sales-related positions that require Bachelor’s degrees over the next ten years indicates filling these positions will remain a high priority of sales organizations (United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2018). Consequently, while many organizations are encountering challenges in developing a pool of qualified applicants, there are issues also with developing and retaining those hired. After finding qualified applicants, onboarding time is over six months for 71% of companies and over nine months for 33% of companies. This recruiting challenge couples with high annual salesperson turnover potentially as a result of low resiliency (Bande, Fernandez-Ferrin, Varela, & Jaramillo, 2015). This turnover costs firms fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars for each new salesperson not retained (2017 Martec Recruiter Sentiment Study).
Organizations rightfully focus on reducing the extended time and high costs for sourcing sales professionals and are working to develop better selection processes (Klein 2014). Firms striving to increase revenues and reduce recruiting costs will challenge managers to onboard recruits more quickly, deploy them sooner, and retain them longer. These challenges drive the industry’s need for more efficient and effective sales position selection processes. In short, the goal is to hire candidates that achieve sustainable success.
Understanding person-job-career success is not a new problem, and studies in a variety of literature streams, including psychology, management, human resources, medical, and marketing, address different facets of this issue. One such area of emphasis is personality traits and their influence on career success. In this literature, research evidence using personality commonly uses the five-factor model: agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability or neuroticism, extroversion, and openness to experience. The “Five-Factor” or “Big 5” model has been extensively tested against a wide variety of occupational situations: leadership, job performance, job satisfaction, and career success (Norman 1963; Digman 1990; Barrick and Mount 1991; Judge, Heller, and Klinger 2008; Judge et al. 1999).
We suggest two limitations to only relying on personality traits when selecting sales professionals. The first limitation is that Big 5 testing may not be sensitive to some types of selling careers (Barrick and Mount 1991). The second limitation is that previous studies rely on tenured salespeople and their career success, which may not transfer to early career success. Sales subjects in extant studies tend to have many years of job experience at the same company or within specific industries (Barrick, Mount, and Strauss 1993; Thoresen et al. 2004). It appears there is a gap in the literature with a lack of research on personality factors that lead to early-stage sales career success. It is far from clear that a new hire selection approach predicated only on personality traits is helpful to managers seeking better selection performance.
We assert that changes in career outlook and educational opportunities lead to student’s self-selecting educational paths that support a sales career. Analogous to the gravitational hypothesis “that, over time, individuals will gravitate to jobs commensurate with their ability” (Wilk, Desmarais, and Sackett 1995), we suggest collegiate sales students gravitate to majors that support their abilities. We propose that collegiate selling programs can provide a platform for developing selling skills that enable early professional sales success. Specifically, we propose that sales role-play fits extant learning theory on developing resilience, a skill associated with sales success (Krush et al. 2013; Agnihotri et al. 2014).
In this paper, we review personality, career, and learning literature to examine how personality factors and resilience lead to early-stage sales career success. After establishing a conceptual foundation, we generate and test hypotheses resulting in outcomes that emphasize the academic and practitioner pertinence of resilience. The contributions are the refinement of selection criteria relevant to recruiting for early sales careers, additional insights into the traits that create a foundation for a successful professional career, and some indication that current curricula and pedagogy in collegiate professional sales programs are salient.