Relationship between sales ability and ratings of the transcribed voices of salesmen

Abstract

Transcriptions were made of the voices of 14 salesmen from a large men's store and 15 saleswomen from a large department store, each subject reading two scripts, each of which had a reading time of about 25 seconds. Three groups of judges, consisting of 45, 35, and 56 psychology students, rated the voices on one of three traits: enthusiasm, convincingness, or sales ability. Reliability coefficients of the voice ratings ranged from .53 to .80. For the salesmen, rank difference coefficients of correlation between sales ability as rated by the management and voice ratings were approximately zero. For the saleswomen, correlations of -.54, -.47, and -.32 are reported between sales cost (ratio between salary and sales) and voice ratings for sales ability, convincingness, and enthusiasm, respectively. Both salesmen and saleswomen were divided into a superior and an inferior group, and the mean voice ratings were found for each group for the three traits rated. The differences between means were found to be in favor of the superior group in all cases; these differences ranged from .34 to .97 scale points on a scale with a range of 7 points. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)