Congratulations to Dr. Maximilian Knapp, Prof. Christian Homburg and Dr. Robin Wagner-Fabisch, whose paper on “Personality matters: how adaptive selling skills mediate the effect of personality traits on salespeople’s exploited cross-selling potential” was recently published in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, one of the most important journals for sales research.
 
Within their paper, they investigate the relationships between personality traits, adaptive selling skills, and exploited cross-selling potential of salespeople.

They find extraversion and conscientiousness to have significant indirect effects, mediated by adaptive selling skills. Furthermore, all five personality traits influence adaptive selling skills significantly. However, in contrast to prior research on the impact of personality on sales performance indicators, they do not find direct effects of personality traits on exploited cross-selling potential. Therefore, they conclude that knowing about someone's personality alone does not suffice to predict cross-selling performance outcomes.

With their paper, the researchers open new avenues for cross-selling as well as adaptive selling research and suggest HR to use abbreviated personality questionnaires in recruiting scenarios to identify well suited applicants for cross-selling intensive sales positions.

Read additional information & the full article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08853134.2023.2289698