A Study of Salesperson’s Competencies for Developing Competency Development Plan Affecting Purchasing Decision of Traditional Trade Customers

Abstract

This qualitative research aims to study the desirable characteristics of salespersons in the traditional trade market and also design a salesperson development plan. Therefore, we collected data from three groups of people including four salesperson experts, twenty traditional trade store owners and another twenty experienced traditional-trade salesperson.

As a result, we found that the desirable characteristics of salespersons comprise of three dimensions: 1) personality and mindset, 2) knowledge and expertise and 3) duties and responsibilities. For instance, salespeople should suitably dress and sincerely talk with customers with service-oriented mindsets. Moreover, they have to be experts in their products and well-informed about their markets. Furthermore, they are expected to support their customers in many aspects such as customers visiting, sale order processing and after- sales services. As a consequence, we design a salesperson development plan by employing the 70:20:10 approach focusing on learning by doing, group discussion and classroom training accordingly.