Demystifying Adaptive Selling – Exploring Salesperson Attributes and Service Behaviors

Services organizations face ever-increasing customer demands and competition, especially in face-to-face retail sales encounters, hence it is extremely important to ‘recruit the right kind’ of salespeople and give them the ‘right kind of training’ to better serve and satisfy their customers. However, there is little research that combines these two perspectives in the adaptive selling context. We address this gap with a comprehensive model including four salesperson characteristics (attractiveness, communication ability, expertise and trustworthiness) as antecedents, three service performance behaviors (service manner, extra role and need identification) as mediators and three important outcome behaviors (willingness to disclose, customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions) as consequences. We also test this model using a field-survey with actual customers in a retail setting in Hong Kong. Our findings help demystify the adaptive selling by unraveling the customer evaluation and judgment processes

Drivers of sales performance: a contemporary meta-analysis. Have salespeople become knowledge brokers?

It has been 25 years since the publication of a comprehensive review of the full spectrum of sales-performance drivers. This study takes stock of the contemporary field and synthesizes empirical evidence from the period 1982-2008. The authors revise the classification scheme for sales performance determinants devised by Walker et al. (1977) and estimate both the predictive validity of its sub-categories and the impact of a range of moderators on determinant-sales performance relationships. Based on multivariate causal model analysis, the results make two major observations: (1) Five sub-categories demonstrate significant relationships with sales performance: selling-related knowledge (β =.28), degree of adaptiveness (β =.27), role ambiguity (β = -.25), cognitive aptitude (β =.23) and work engagement (β =.23). (2) These sub-categories are moderated by measurement method, research context, and sales-type variables. The authors identify managerial implications of the results and offer suggestions for further research, including the conjecture that as the world is moving toward a knowledge-intensive economy, salespeople could be functioning as knowledge-brokers. The results seem to back this supposition and indicate how it might inspire future research in the field of personal selling

Client-perceived performance and value in professional B2B services: An international perspective

Drawing from the resource-based view and a contingency approach, the authors develop and test a model of the antecedents of client-perceived value in the context of international, professional business-to-business services (consultants, engineers, project management, IT consultants, etc.) in a developing economies setting. Further, we examine the effects of key moderators (e.g., country-of-origin (COO), firm's international experience, client's buying experience) on client-perceived performance and value. The results generally support the hypotheses that client-perceived performance is impacted by a firm's internal resources (e.g., technical skills, customer orientation, innovation). In addition, this relationship is contingent upon the COO effect, while client-perceived value is moderated by the client's buying experience. The findings can guide practitioners as to the key drivers of client-perceived value, and under what conditions this value is maximized. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 274–300; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400406