Salespeople's personality

As we all know, an important component in instructional design is understanding our learners motivations. To support this, I've been spent a little time researching the personality traits and motivational characteristics that have an effect on sales performance.

I've recently read an interesting article (cite below) that discusses which personality traits affect the ability to perform new skills/knowledge as compared to those traits required for successful experienced performance. Learning and performance were found to require two different sets of skills:

• Extroversion and Conscientiousness are required for experienced performance
  
• Agreeableness was required for successful application of new knowledge
  
• Openess to Experience was required for successful application of new knowledge and was associated with higher sales overall

In addition, this study found that pharmaceutical salespeople's performance improved over time, while a different study found that insurance salespeople's performance plateaued after three years.

I thought that this was interesting because it suggests that successful salespeople may not always have the traits of the successful student. I would also like to find out more about the effect of time on sales performance. It may be that a sales person might expect peak performance after a certain amount of time. This means that if you aren't happy with your sales after 3 years, you shouldn't expect too much of an increase after then.

Bibliography:
Thoresen, C. J., Bradley, J. C., Bliese, P.D. & Thoresen, J.D (2004). The Big Five Personality Traits and Individual Job Performance Growth Trajectories in Maintenance and Transitional Job Stages; Journal of Applied Psychology, 89 (5) 835-853.