Personality and Sales – Customizing Careers for Sales’ People

This study is focused on personality of sales personnel and how they experience sales situations. The interest is to see, if there are personality related tasks that suit especially well for certain personalities and what kind of aspects could be considered when developing sales personnel. Personality is measured with Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which provides four preference pairs: Extraversion – Introversion (E-I), Sensing – Intuition (S-N), Thinking – Feeling (T-F) and Judging – Perceiving (J-P). From those altogether 16 types are formed (e.g., ISTJ, ESTP, INFP etc.). Data was collected from 73 Finnish sales’ people. Results indicated that personality is crucial factor when customizing jobs in sales. The well-being and best performance are ensured when sales personnel can work with their strengths not with their weaknesses. The results of this study are helpful in job design and building different developmental paths for each personality. Keywords: sales, personality, needs for development