The paradigm for research on buyer-seller interactions generally has two principles: (1) employees should approach each customer without any priors (e.g., stereotypes, preconceived notions, judgments) and (2) employees should accurately assess the customer’s needs and then adapt their selling approach to match those customer’s needs. While research in this “adaptive selling” approach has been shown to have a positive relationship to a number of important employee and firm outcomes, little to no research has empirically tested the first principle that employees should not have any prior judgments towards customers.  
Using research on thin-slice judgments and a unique, in-store, interaction-specific data set that combines pre- and post-interaction surveys from both customers and employees, observational records, and objective measures of sales; this research aims to directly challenge the first principle of adaptive selling in three ways.   First, we show that employees do in fact possess a set of priors about each customer. Second, these priors or “intuitions” based on surface-level and context-specific cues can in fact be very accurate in predicting customer behavior. Third and most important, these priors held by employees, when accurate, have profound effects on the selling process and outcomes of the buyer-seller interaction. In the end, this research demonstrates that it is important for employees to accurately identify their customer’s needs during the interaction (principle 2).   However, absent from previous research, these positive outcomes as a result of this need knowledge acquisition is highly dependent on the employees ability to intuit what if the customer will buy, what the customer’s needs are, and how much the customer will spend prior to ever interacting with the customer.