Students' Perceptions of Personal Selling

Students’ Perceptions of Personal Selling William A. Weeks and Darrel D. Muehling A word association approach was used to determine the turned to the nation’s universities as a pool of potential salient thoughts students have with regard to personal selling. sales recruits. Unfortunately, corporate recruiters often Examining the very first thought that comes to mind when find it difficult to persuade students to interview for sales exposed to the words “‘personal selling” revealed that, despite positions as well as accept job offers. This has resulted the efforts of some companies and educators, the stereotypical in firms not being able to attract and hire as many qualified view of selling as a “door-to-door” profession (often com- students as they’d like, and may be a contributing factor prised of less-than-professional salespeople), remains quite to the rising costs of training and retaining salespeople. prevalent in the minds of college students. Recommendations Recognizing the existence of this problem, academic to assist college recruiters in overcoming these negative per- researchers over the last three decades have attempted to ceptions and improving their recruitment efforts are discussed. develop a better understanding of students’ perceptions of personal selling, often with the intent to aid corporate recruiters in their hiring efforts. Results of these studies reflect the fact that personal selling is not often held in INTRODUCTION high esteem [5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 17, 19, 201, though more recent studies [l, 61 have reported some improvement. America’s well-trained labor force and modern mass Given that students often lack a complete understanding production capabilities have culminated in a large ca- of selling’s role [ 1, 7, 14-171, humor (jokes), novels, pacity to produce goods and services. Consequently, the short stories, stage productions, television programs, and need to locate and persuade buyers to consume these newspaper comics have merely reinforced and perpetu- goods and services (in order to maintain the balance be- ated the often negative stereotype of salespeople [20]. tween production and consumption) has resulted in an The fact that sales occupations are held in low regard ever-increasing demand for qualified salespeople [ 111. by the public in general and students in particular extends In order to meet this demand, companies have often beyond being just a problem for sales managers to being a problem for the entire business community. For ex- Address correspondence to Professor William A. Weeks, Department of ample, Thompson [20] contends that salesmen are a per- Marketing, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-4725. sonification of just about everything that young people Industrial Marketing Management 16, 145 I5 I (1987) 145 0 1987 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc., 1987 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, NY 10017 0019-8501/87/$3.50 find most distasteful about the “Establishment” and its Thus, one might conclude that the first thought is the perceived way of life. As a result, he believes highly most salient thought, and thereby provides the truest rep- educated and intelligent young people are downgrading resentation of a student’s perception of personal selling. careers in business in general, whereas previously the Conversely, if students are given an opportunity to report sales field had been most affected. Such findings ob- many thoughts, it is conceivable that they will resort to viously lend strong support for the continued need to find a more conscious approach as the task continues, result- better ways to understand students’ perceptions of per- ing in the reporting of thoughts that are less valid indi- sonal selling and to determine what U.S. industrial cor- cators of their perceptions of selling. In any event, it was porations can do to improve the situation. felt that a word association approach would provide a With the exception of a study conducted nearly 30 simple means of discovering how college students of the years ago by Staunton [19] who asked students to list 1980s perceive personal selling. The results of such a five words they associated with the word “salesman,” study may provide sales recruiters with useful insight that most studies have examined students’ perceptions pri- can be used to overcome the reluctance college students marily through the use of forced-choice types of survey have toward entering the sales profession. items [l, 6, 7, 14-171. The position in this paper, is that Therefore, the purposes of this study are: (1) to de- a word association technique identifies underlying per- termine students’ perceptions of personal selling, by ex- ceptions of selling. The technique is designed to capture amining the “first thought” to come to mind in a word the most salient thoughts individuals have about a subject. association task, and (2) to translate these findings into To improve the validity of such reports, only the “first recommendations industrial sales recruiters can incor- thoughts” (rather than all thoughts) should be examined. porate into their recruiting strategies. Support for isolating and examining initial thoughts is found in the psychology literature: METHODOLOGY When a series of association is demanded and the subject is requested to produce all his associations Sample without stopping, the intrusion of more or less con- The sample consisted of 300 Introduction to Marketing scious purposes cannot, as a rule, be prevented. A students, 156 (52%) males and 144 (48%) females, the ma- mass of valueless co-ordinations and coexistences jority (75%) of whom were business majors. Given that cor- occur. It is, therefore, well to demand only one porate recruiters hire both business and nonbusiness students association to the given percept, and at the same for sales positions, it was felt the sample provided a fairly time to exclude the introduction of any directed representative breakdown of students who may even re- thought by requesting as quick a reaction as possible motely be considering a sales-related position upon gradua- (PI,PP. 5-6). tion. Furthermore, the results of recent studies by Bellenger, Bemhardt, and Wayman [l] and Dubinsky [6], indicate that students from different disciplines or at different levels of WILLIAM A. WEEKS and DARREL D. MUEHLING are Assistant their college education do not vary with respect to their per- Professors of Marketing, Washington State University, Pullman, ceptions of selling. Subsequent analysis of the pattern of Washington. thoughts in this study verified the fact that there were no sig- nificant differences in perceptions as a result of college major Word associations identified underlying perceptions of selling. 146 or sex. Therefore, the results of this study should be fairly salespeople act and/or look. Statements such as “friendly,” generalizable . “outgoing personality,” “pushy,” “obnoxious salesman,” and “sometimes offensive for customers,” exemplified the Procedure types of thoughts contained in this category. The fourth category (labeled “Door-to-Door-related” As part of a larger study dealing with students reactions thoughts) contained thoughts dealing with the environ- to personal selling, a word association technique was used ment in which salespeople sell, more specifically, the to determine the one word (or phrase) students most com- door-to-door environment. All of the statements placed monly associate with personal selling. Before performing in this fourth category contained specific reference to the task, students were given a “trial run” activity on ‘ ‘door-to-door’ ’ selling. an unrelated topic to ensure they understood the research- Any statements alluding to a student’s future employ- ers’ requests. Employing a format often used by cognitive ment plans or preparations were placed in the fifth cat- response researchers [3, 4, 10, 211, students were asked egory of thoughts (labeled “Future Employment-related” to respond to the words “personal selling” by writing thoughts). Thoughts such as “resume writing,” “job all thoughts that came to mind about the topic in 1” x 7” interviews,” and “selling yourself to a future employer” boxes provided on the first three pages of a questionnaire. were typical of the thoughts contained in this category. Students were given 3 minutes to perform the task, after Students’ perceptions of what individuals actually do which they were instructed to evaluate each written in a sales job represented the sixth category (“Task- related” thoughts). A few of the statements contained in thought as being either positive (in which case a “ + ” this category included: “selling by word of mouth,” was written in the margin to the right of the thought), “face-to-face interaction with customers,” “answering negative (represented by a “ - “), or neutral (represented objections,” and “knocking on doors. ” by a “0”). Students were then instructed to complete the The seventh category was labeled “Business-related” remaining items on the questionnaire, including items thoughts and included references to personal selling’s role in dealing with demographic information. relation to other elements of business, or reference specifically to the other elements. Examples included “profit mak- Analysis ing, ” “advertising,” and “marketing,” among others. Any thoughts, such as “slow,” “MTV,” and “what’s In order to facilitate the analysis of the freely associated personal selling, ’ ’ that were difficult to categorize made thoughts, it was necessary to develop a coding scheme. up the

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