Examining Expertise Differences in Retail Sales: A Script-based Analysis of Customer Interactions

Understanding how salespeople structure and reason through customer conversations is central to explaining expertise in sales, yet research is lacking about their cognitive representations. This study investigates how salespeople at different levels of expertise conceptualise a typical sales interaction and how their underlying cognitive structures vary across expertise levels (N = 33). Using a script-elicitation method, we analyse how novices, experienced professionals and experts describe the sequence and content of salesperson–customer interactions. Analyses focused on the sequence, emphasis, and knowledge components of their verbally described scripts. The findings reveal differences in mental representations: novices rely on formal, rule-based procedures; experienced professionals integrate situational and case-based adaptations; experts demonstrate intuitive, context-sensitive reasoning. The findings highlight how professional cognition in sales becomes increasingly flexible and adaptive with experience and contribute to a deeper understanding of expertise development in customer-oriented domains.