In lots of jobs, emotional intelligence is not that important, specially when you can "outsource" it from the workers to managers but on sales it is an essential ability.
The article's point is that they designed a test to check whether this is true, and found that in terms of dollars (which are the whole point of sales people) it wasn't. If you'd said "programmers," there wouldn't be too much room to disagree. Or if the author hadn't published other papers in the field, there probably wouldn't be grounds for disagreement, since nobody should take someone's word that they "ran a test" without at least some academic familiarity. But here's the author's related research: http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract
Unless the whole article is a submarine piece to plug http://www.optimizehire.com/ (which is quite possible), it would seem that ignoring the facts while sticking to your gut feelings is a bad idea. That said, whether they are facts is debatable, since it's simply an anecdote from the author. But personally, I'd find it extremely interesting if an experiment called into question conventional wisdom, so hopefully the author will release rigorous details about his methodology and process.
The article's point is that they designed a test to check whether this is true, and found that in terms of dollars (which are the whole point of sales people) it wasn't. If you'd said "programmers," there wouldn't be too much room to disagree. Or if the author hadn't published other papers in the field, there probably wouldn't be grounds for disagreement, since nobody should take someone's word that they "ran a test" without at least some academic familiarity. But here's the author's related research: http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract
Unless the whole article is a submarine piece to plug http://www.optimizehire.com/ (which is quite possible), it would seem that ignoring the facts while sticking to your gut feelings is a bad idea. That said, whether they are facts is debatable, since it's simply an anecdote from the author. But personally, I'd find it extremely interesting if an experiment called into question conventional wisdom, so hopefully the author will release rigorous details about his methodology and process.