Alice had a distinctive personal taste and passion for fashion, her selection of pieces from the likes of Worth, Doucet, Jeanne Lanvin and Poiret confirms this. She conserved her clothes and accessories carefully. Some of them were unworn, still carrying their labels and boxes after almost a century. Amongst all those beautiful vintage clothes there were a lot of professional hints as well. This is what I am interested in writing about.

From Cheruit boutique. Photograph from the album Les Créateurs de mode © Édition du Figaro / All rights reserved Photo © G. Agié / © Gérard Leyris

The “premiere vendeuse” was a key person for the haute couture houses. This role was strongly influencing the relations with the clients. Couturiers, most of them men, had their team of senior sales women who were in charge of contacting the clients, getting appointments, managing the appointments, presenting the collections by being the voice of the master mind, having their feedbacks to refer to the couturier, taking orders and of course making sure the client would come back. They were also keeping up with the social life and being active in bringing new clients to the House. All of this in the most personalized manner.

Let’s go back to haute couture way of selling to better understand what selling really meant then. A client didn’t go to a store, pick a dress, pay it straight away and leave with it in ten minutes. The client would have an appointment, would see some dresses worn by the house’s mannequins, make a personal selection and order. She would have the garments delivered after the fittings, all handmade of course. In this process, selling one dress would not be profitable for a couture house, it had to sell a seasonal wardrobe in order to survive. From the day dress, to the evening gown, to the one for the picnic and one for the tea time. In a situation like this how could a vendeuse do a sale without knowing about the life and taste of her clients? I hear you answering readily: Not possible.

In the exhibition there were hand written and signed letters to Alice from her favorite shops. Letters were invitations to see the new collection or to attend an event. Other examples also witness the era, in a Jeanne Lanvin boutique the team was asked to register the client comments on two different sheets, regardless of a sale or not. One sheet was for the store archive and one for Jeanne Lanvin herself who wanted to know why her clients desired or not desired a design. Cristobal Balenciaga is known not only as the master of couture but also as a passionate archiver, who kept records of everything related to his clients in order to make sure they were not only numbers. Couturiers were also happy to meet their clients sometimes, but we know it is not always easy for a creative to get first hand feedback. Like Paul Poiret states in his autobiography, he once answered his client who was complaining about the dress she received, saying “Poiret is me, and I, Poiret, I tell you: this dress is good, it is beautiful, and it suits you.”

Even in the days of couture there were CRM methods. The technology was not there but the invitations were sent, client cards were kept and client feedback was registered. As more and more technology replaces the human interaction, brands may believe that having the sale assistant with an ipad register a clients name, email address and phone will be enough to assure the next visit or sale. The CRM department decides the message to communicate and sends newsletters and invitations to the clients. But what about the conversation? Do we need to go back to a haute couture state of mind in selling?

With the online shopping being so easy,fast and fun, what makes a client come back to a store, if not the experience?The experience does not only mean touching the clothes and visiting the brand’s universe, but finding someone who listens to you and who would “co-create” the journey with you. In a maison of haute couture, the sales women had to make sure they provided a visionary service, from knowing what the friends of their client was wearing, to the events they attended, to the weather in their summer holiday vacation. The fabric, the fit, the cut needed to be chosen carefully because it couldn’t have been returned or remade totally. It was a careful investigation and a risky matter in the hands of master sellers.

The figure of sales person was key in Haute Couture times, it is still key now. The advancements in technology and marketing can’t change this fact. Hundreds of store openings shouldn’t keep the designers far away from the sales teams. The two have a bond that will always contribute to the success of a brand and if this bond is not there, it cannot be faked.

From Haute Couture to today, the role of the vendeuse was originally published in Emotions Influence Sales Performance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Emotions Influence Sales Performance. So why don’t we talk about them?

We talk about clients. We talk about clients a lot. What do they want, how do they feel, what do they share on social media, how happy or unhappy they are and so on…The same is true for research. Academic articles mainly focus on consumer behaviour or sales management from customer perspective. I can hear those working in retail commenting “Of course, client is our number one priority.”

The act of selling itself puts the client on the spotlight. However when it was time for me to write my Insead thesis, all I wanted to do was to turn that spotlight on another highly important person: the salesperson. An important stakeholder, if not the most important, in retail store eco-system.

Imagine you are now entering a store. What do you bring in with you?

Let me give you one example: expectations. High expectations. Whether or not you, as a client accept or deny it, unconsciously you go in with thousand expectations, one of them is being “happy”. This is quite a lot of responsibility to handle for anyone we interact with, don’t you think?

Now I can hear someone saying “It is the responsibility and the job of a salesperson to make the customer happy”. I agree that it is imperative for a salesperson to make the customer happy. However, we usually don’t question what is the true effort that lies behind making clients happy. This was my true research calling.

Service jobs and front line employees have long been a focus of academic research. There is also an increasing number of research around how monitoring the effects of emotions can improve sales performance. Some of the concepts I took as reference during my own thesis research are listed below:

• Emotional labor: Introduced by Sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book “The managed heart” (1983) after having conducted research on the role of flight attendants, “emotional labor” refers to the management of emotional expressions in order to comply with company rules. A typical example is to “always welcome with a smile”. When smiling becomes an obligation it comes with an effort which is not physical effort, like staying on your feet all day long, but it is emotional, an “emotional tiredness”, which has a cost and in Hochschild’s words in service jobs is “sold for a wage”.
• Role stress: Research shows that salespeople who experience role stress tend to reduce their customer-centric efforts. Here role stress includes both physical and mental stress that comes with the “salesperson role”. It differs from stress as we know it, in a sense that it involves being confused or unclear about own duties, and feeling stuck in the middle of two highly demanding forces: store managers and clients.
• Sales call anxiety: There’s nothing more fearful for a salesperson than being avoided or rejected by a customer. Sales call anxiety refers to a salesperson’s denial to approach a customer with the fear of being rejected or failing in the encounter. Selling is a game of emotions and one bad experience is sometimes enough to start avoiding (unconsciously or consciously) the next client that happens to be there.

(see some academic references below)

In my research I had two questions in mind:

1. What are the factors that influence a salesperson’s emotions at work?
2. How salespeople manage to recover from unpleasant sales encounters in order to be “emotionally” ready for the next client?

Taking into account the above mentioned concepts, I decided to study the retail store as a system on its own. The word “system” here means that I consider the store as an environment in which company, brand and team culture and processes influence and shape the emotional needs of a salesperson, who in turn, shapes the culture and processes of the store. In other words everything is interconnected. All this, have an “invisible” impact on the customer’s experience. It is the ghost that no one sees but everyone feels.

Either negatively or positively.

To be more clear, imagine you are inside the store and already talking to a salesperson. Do you think you are talking to him only? Actually, you are talking to the salesperson who has a lot of things in mind, customer satisfaction (your satisfaction), manager’s expectations “Am I doing it right?”, company rules “What was the latest decision?”, KPIs “How much do I still need to sell today?”, colleagues “What are the others selling today?” and probably personal matters “I have to pick up the kids from school”. It would be quite impossible to believe that a salesperson’s performance is not impacted by the emotional luggage that comes with these thoughts.

Is that luggage heavy or light? This is what I am interested in. Of course my interest lies in making that luggage light, so that salesperson can focus on the happiness of him/herself and his/her clients.

Furthermore, I am interested to know what one can do in both cases, to manage his/her own performance without being managed by fears, anxiety or frustration coming out of that luggage.

For my thesis research I have interviewed salespeople that work in various luxury brands and tried to open a conversation about these ghost components of sales. In a series of posts, I will summarize my research topic, findings and suggestions.

Please follow the next posts if you are interested to know more and do not hesitate to get in touch for comments, suggestions or questions.

Some academic references that you may be interested in:

• Verbeke, W., Bagozzi, R.P. (2000). Sales call anxiety: Exploring what it means when fear rules a sales encounter. Journal of Marketing
• Hochschild, A, R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California press.
• Julian, C. (2008). Emotional dissonance and customer service: An exploratory study. Services Marketing Quarterly
• Weeks, W.A, Fournier, C., (2010). The impact of time congruity on salesperson’s role stress: A person-job fit approach. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

Emotions Influence Sales Performance. So why don’t we talk about them? was originally published in Emotions Influence Sales Performance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.