A Closer Look at Emotional Intelligence in Marketing Exchange

Abstract Emotional intelligence (EI) is important in many business contexts. Knowing how sales professionals use emotions to facilitate positive outcomes for their firms, themselves and their customers is particularly important for managing marketing exchanges. To leverage EI it is necessary to accurately measure it. Existing scales are of limited value and therefore a new scale to measure EI in marketing exchange is presented here. It focuses on EI related abilities in the specific context of marketing exchange and effectively demonstrates how EI interacts with sales, customer orientation, the extent of influence of a sales rep in an encounter, customer retention and cognitive ability. The new tool helps to diagnose individual levels of marketing exchange EI. It can be very useful for employee selection and designing specific sales training in order to improve exchange relationships and interactions between buyers and sellers, in particular.