Client Evaluation Cues: A Comparison of Successful and Unsuccessful Salespeople

Most salespeople attempt to identify likely purchasers of a product by using evaluation cues stored in memory to classify potential customers. The authors investigate how these cues differ for successful and unsuccessful salespeople. They find that successful and unsuccessful salespeople have the same number of cues in memory, and that the two types of representatives distribute importance weights about the same across evaluation cues. Successful and unsuccessful salespeople weight many of the same cues differently, however. The standards they use to describe class members also differ for several cues, with successful salespeople generally using more stringent criteria. The authors discuss the implications of the findings and offer some directions for future research.