An Empirical Study on Eliciting a Competency Required by Salespeople : Differentiating B2B Salespeople and B2C Salespeople

Purpose - Our research started out with an assumption that a further study about the competency of B2B and B2C salespeople is needed, and has thus focused on enhancing their abilities throughout various fields. It seems that the ability of sales representatives has a positive influence on the image and revenue of the company. Since businesses find it apparent that the role of salespeople will become significant in the future, our research aims to provide a foundation for future research on exploring the necessary competencies for salespeople by conducting an in-depth interview as well as survey. Research design, data, and methodology - The methods of our research can be broken down into four steps - an interview on salespeople, eliciting salespeople’s potential competency, surveys, and analysis. First, our research team conducted interviews on forty subjects. Second, we strived to elicit potential competency of salespeople based on data gained from previous studies and in-depth interviews. And Third, we came up with our own survey templates. Last but not least, our research team analyzed the results from the surveys to elicit necessary capabilities for the salespeople. Results - The results of our research show a clear distinction between B2B and B2C salespeople on all categories that we measured such as the character fitness, competence of emotion and sales marketing. As for B2B salespeople, the results indicated openness(M: 3.8265) in character fitness, and self-motivation(M: 4.1887), group cognition(M: 3.8735), teamwork(M: 3.9956) in competence of emotion, and previous research(M: 3.8735), proposal of values(M: 4.3873), cooperation with other team(M: 4.0441) in competence of sales marketing. The difference in capability required between B2B salespeople and B2C salespeople was very pronounced. Conclusions - For future studies, enhanced pool of subjects with various backgrounds is needed in order for our research to reach a wide range of population. The results