Impact of Stressful Situations on Salespersons' Gestures

ABSTRACT

Interest: This research analyses the influence of situations on salespersons’ gestures and behaviors. This research contributes to this underresearched field by exploring the impact of stressful versus nonstressful situations on salespersons’ personal behavior.

Methods: This research is based on 1,205 gestures observed during 382 sales calls that averaged 11 minutes with 382 salespersons. Half were in stressful situations, and half were in nonstressful situations. This study focuses on pharmaceutical products (drugs) in the medical field, with 95 doctors, 6 judges, 304 average performing salespersons, 39 high performers, and 39 low performers. This study shows how salespersons’ behaviors vary depending on stressful and nonstressful situations. This research also articulates a new field of sales research that is understudied by researchers and suggests new training trends in sales management.

Objective: The objective is to answer questions such as “Does stress influence salespersons’ behavior, and what are the gestures most affected by such situations?” To examine the effects of training on gestures, an experiment with 97 salespersons was conducted during a sales training session. This experiment measured whether salespersons trained on gestures behaved differently than those who were untrained.

Results: In general, stressful or nonstressful situations caused real differences in gestural behavior. In particular, the best salespersons performed the largest number of gestures during stressful situations. For example, stressful situations increased the mechanical or emotional gestures in leg movements or the number of glances.

KEYWORDS:

• performance
• sales
• salesperson
• stress situations