Retail Salespersons
The formal qualifications required to become a retail salesperson are often, quite literally, zero. Not even high school graduation is insisted upon in most stores, although a pleasant manner, a tidy appearance and basic literacy and familiarity with computer equipment are. However, this is in fact changing, as the BLS points out. For a very long time, decades, retail sales has been one of the few areas where you could get ahead without those formal educational requirements. If you were good at the job then you would be promoted, to better departments, to junior management positions and, if you kept showing that you were good at each stage of the process, all the way up into general management.
However, this has now changed: to get into the management stream you need a college degree. the larger companies prefer to hire those with a college degree directly as management trainees. The side effect of this is that however good you are at the actual job, it will remain just that, a job, not a career.
Which brain type, by our EQSQ personality tests, is likely to do best here though? The answer should, I think, be obvious, from our own experience of asking for help in a shop. What we actually want is not the help to find what we think we want, rather, for someone to read us and lead us to what we really want but don’t know about. That’s empathy that is, the ability to do that, so it will be the female brain types who do best in this line of work.
February 17th, 2007 at 3:53 am
This past year I worked for a major electronics retail chain as a floor salesperson selling computers, laptops, digital cameras and printers.
I worked with a female coworker named Diana that knew more about digital cameras than I did. Many times I referred customers (both men and women) to her expertise yet they still preferred my opinions and advice.
On computers and computer accessories customers approached me far more often than she. But on the other tack, if a customer was indecisive Diana had a pronounced sales advantage. She talked with these customers for a few hours before selling them a device and all the accessories that matched it. I had my share of long winded sales as well but I always had to initiate contact and establish my expertise in the first few moments of conversation. It was always my technical knowledge that won the customer’s confidence more than my conversational manner.
Although Diana and I sold items at a similar ratio to men of all ages, older women chose me and younger women or girls chose her.
We certainly played into our EQSQ roles but these roles were based upon customer subconscious perceptions.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Jacob, that’s great, I always like getting feedback from those with the frontline intelligence. But whether it was in fact your own attributes or those that the customers expected you to have, well, that I’m not sure about. It’s an old thing, that correlation doesn’t prove causality. That the EQSQ roles do in fact describe reality is one thing, but why they do, well that’s another piece of intelligence.
It could indeed be that people expected things to be that way and so were more receptive to particular approaches, it could be that the two of you did indeed have different innate talents.
Still, good to see that we are in fact describing the real world.