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1 – 10 of over 7000Michael W Preis, Salvatore F Divita and Amy K Smith
Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered…
Abstract
Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.
Halimin Herjanto, Muslim Amin and Cut Erika Fatimah
This study investigates the role of knowledge collecting and donating in enhancing relationship proneness and intimacy and improving a bank's salesperson satisfaction and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study investigates the role of knowledge collecting and donating in enhancing relationship proneness and intimacy and improving a bank's salesperson satisfaction and performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the snowball technique, 315 online questionnaires were collected from commercial banks. A total of 300 useable questionnaires were included for further analysis.
Findings
The findings demonstrated that knowledge collecting affects relationship proneness and salesperson performance, while knowledge donating affects relationship proneness but not satisfaction. The results also suggested that relationship proneness is responsible for salesperson intimacy. Furthermore, intimacy was found to affect salesperson performance and satisfaction. Finally, salesperson satisfaction was found to affect salesperson performance positively.
Practical implications
The findings help bankers understand and utilize the power of their knowledge management in improving their sales performance and developing suitable training and strategies to strengthen salesperson intimacy.
Originality/value
This study incorporated knowledge management, relationship proneness and intimacy to enhance a better understanding of how these indicators will affect the salesperson's satisfaction and performance.
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Tyler Hancock, Michael L. Mallin, Ellen B. Pullins and Catherine M. Johnson
This study aims to use cognitive appraisal theory to explain how organizational disruption influences the development of envy resulting in unethical selling practices, turnover…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to use cognitive appraisal theory to explain how organizational disruption influences the development of envy resulting in unethical selling practices, turnover intentions and a reduction in customer orientation that causes disruption to impact customer relationships. This research helps to address drivers of salesperson envy, the potential disruptions to customer relationships and the required need to invest in psychological resources to offset these negative effects.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 211 salespeople were surveyed to test the hypotheses. First, the measurement model was validated using a confirmatory factor analysis. Next, the hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling AMOS 27. Mediation and moderated mediation were tested using the bootstrap method. Estimands were created within AMOS to test the indirect and interaction effects in the full model. A post hoc analysis further informed the findings.
Findings
The results show that the development of envy increases under conditions of organizational disruptions, leading to potential customer disruptions through turnover intentions, unethical selling behaviors and a reduction in customer orientation. In addition, the mediation analysis shows that envy drives the relationship between organizational disruption and unethical selling, turnover intentions and customer orientation through fully mediated relationships. Finally, the interaction effects between organizational disruption and psychological capital show high levels of psychological capital help to decrease the development of envy, thus reducing unethical selling behaviors and turnover intentions while increasing customer orientation.
Practical implications
The study provides practitioners with insights into how to reduce envy by investing in the psychological capital of their salesforce. The study also provides suggestions for handling disruptions and managing envy to prevent actions that act to damage customer relationships.
Originality/value
Salespeople are likely to encounter organizational disruption. Sales managers need to be prepared to manage the outcomes of organizational disruption as it impacts the sales force. Understanding how disruptions impact customer relationships through envy is an important yet under-explored topic. This research adds to and expands the sales literature using cognitive appraisal theory to help address drivers of salesperson envy and its potentially negative impact on customer relationships and shows the required need to invest in psychological resources to offset these negative effects. The study also helps expand the recent focus on worldwide disruptions by adopting another context for disruption stemming from organizational disruption.
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Jonna Pauliina Koponen and Saara Maria Julkunen
This paper aims to explore how and why salespeople enhance or hinder long-term business-to-business (B2B) customer relationships at the interpersonal level by considering…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how and why salespeople enhance or hinder long-term business-to-business (B2B) customer relationships at the interpersonal level by considering self-disclosure and relational cost and reward evaluations.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from interviews (N = 47) with B2B sales professionals were analyzed, focusing on the shift of the phases in long-term B2B customer relationships.
Findings
Long-term B2B customer relationships evolve at the interpersonal level through a process of continuous relational cost and reward evaluation, self-disclosure and business disclosure in three phases: becoming business partners, collaborative partners and collaborative and personal partners. The reward evaluations progress from being business related to including even more relational benefits. Disclosure progresses through general business disclosure and general self-disclosure; strategic business disclosure and personal life self-disclosure; and synergistic business disclosure and private self-disclosure.
Research limitations/implications
The long-term B2B customer relationships could be studied at the interpersonal level from the customer’s perspective. Self-disclosure could be studied in cross-cultural settings as well as gender differences should be considered in future studies. Business and social penetration theory could be applied to investigate different types of relationships and other professional relationships, such as those between employers and employees. It would be important to test whether the business-related and self-disclosure subtypes apply to the development of other types of professional relationships or whether other disclosure subtypes exist. The authors recommend exploring salespeople’s and customers’ privacy management strategies in multiple communication channels.
Practical implications
Managers may apply the results of this study in their customer relationship management and sales training.
Originality/value
The findings outline a contextual extension of social penetration theory.
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Magnus Hultman, Abena Animwaa Yeboah-Banin and Nathaniel Boso
Contemporary sales scholarship suggests that salespersons pursuing customer satisfaction should improvise (think and act on their feet) to find solutions to customers’ emergent…
Abstract
Purpose
Contemporary sales scholarship suggests that salespersons pursuing customer satisfaction should improvise (think and act on their feet) to find solutions to customers’ emergent problems. A missing link in this literature, however, is the relational context within which improvisation takes place and becomes effective. This study aims to examine how the tone of the salesperson–customer relationship (whether cordial or coercive) drives and conditions salesperson improvisation and its implications for customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
The study tests the proposed model using dyadic salesperson–customer data from business-to-business (B2B) markets in Ghana. The relationships are tested using structural equation modeling technique.
Findings
The study finds that salesperson improvisation is associated with customer satisfaction. It also finds the extent of cordiality between salespersons and their customers predicts but does not enhance the value of improvisation for customer satisfaction. The reverse is true for customer exercised coercive power which is not a significant driver of improvisation but can substantially alter its benefits for the worse.
Practical implications
By implication, salespersons should improvise more to be able to satisfy customers. However, such improvisation must be tempered with a consciousness of the relationship shared with customers and the level of power they exercise in the relationship.
Originality/value
Because improvised behavior deviates from routines and may be unsettling for customers, improvising salespersons must first understand whether their customers would be willing to accommodate such deviations. Yet, the literature is silent on this relational context surrounding improvisation. This study, by exploring facilitating and inhibitory relational variables implicated in improvisation, addresses this gap.
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Deva Rangarajan, Michael Peasley, Bert Paesbrugghe, Rajesh V. Srivastava and Geoffrey T. Stewart
This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework identifies burnout as a key mediating variable and salesperson grit as a coping mechanism.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data is gathered from 364 B2B salespeople and investigated using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.2.
Findings
The findings reveal adverse life events and their corresponding stress diminish a salesperson’s ability to manage customer relationships effectively through the mediators of reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Thus, negative events of a personal nature can have a significant impact on salesperson outcomes and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as job-related stress. Furthermore, results show that salesperson grit provides mixed results as a coping mechanism.
Practical implications
The findings indicate that practitioners should be mindful of the negative impact adverse life events can have on work-related outcomes. Organizations and sales managers must be intentional in managing relationships with their salespeople and strategic in the structure they use to manage customer relationships. Recommendations include the use of regular one-on-one meetings to open up a dialogue about work or personal issues the salesperson is experiencing and assigning multiple resources or staff to service valuable customers, thereby not relying on solitary salespeople.
Originality/value
Employee well-being contributes to firm value; yet, this is the first study in sales to explore the impact of adverse life events on salesperson outcomes.
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James Boles, Thomas Brashear, Danny Bellenger and Hiram Barksdale
Examines the effect of relationship selling activities on salesperson performance. It further explores the link between demographic selection criteria and the propensity of a…
Abstract
Examines the effect of relationship selling activities on salesperson performance. It further explores the link between demographic selection criteria and the propensity of a salesperson to perform relationship selling behaviors. Relationship selling behaviors as examined in this study include interaction intensity, mutual disclosure, and cooperative intentions. The study was based on a sample of 487 business‐to‐business insurance salespeople. Findings indicate that interaction intensity and mutual disclosure have a significant effect on salesperson performance. Cooperative intentions do not influence performance. Results further demonstrate that some demographic criteria appear to be related to a salesperson’s likelihood of engaging in relationship selling.
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Jonna Koponen, Saara Julkunen, Mika Gabrielsson and Ellen Bolman Pullins
The purpose of this paper is to explore how business-to-business (B2B), intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationships develop using the lens of identity…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how business-to-business (B2B), intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationships develop using the lens of identity management theory (IMT; Imahori and Cupach, 2005).
Design/methodology/approach
The research uses qualitative semi-structured interviews on 18 targeted relationships with customers from another culture conducted with business-to-business salespeople.
Findings
The findings indicate that our respondents' relationships moved from trial toward enmeshment and on occasion toward the renegotiation phase, as described in IMT. In the case of low cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships reached the trial and enmeshment phase. In the case of high cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships on occasion evolved toward the renegotiation phase. Salespeople's cultural intelligence (CQ) facilitates the development of interpersonal, intercultural salesperson–customer relationships.
Originality/value
The authors transfer IMT from the personal relationship development arena to B2B intercultural, interpersonal relationships, address a gap in the literature in the understanding of salesperson–customer interpersonal relationships in different contexts and develop a theoretical model to understand intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationship development across different levels of cultural diversity.
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Omar S. Itani and Aniefre Eddie Inyang
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations between salespeople’s empathy and listening behaviour and the relationship quality (RQ) customers have with their banks…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations between salespeople’s empathy and listening behaviour and the relationship quality (RQ) customers have with their banks, taking into consideration the moderating effect of felt stress (FS) experienced by salespeople. The paper examines specific effects of FS on factors related to a salesperson’s performance.
Design/methodology/approach
To examine the proposed model, responses from 150 customers were collected and matched with responses from 25 salespeople working at a major ba ' nk in Chile. The paper analysed the dyadic data gathered using two analysis techniques. Structural equation modelling was employed to test the relationships proposed at the customer level. Moreover, hierarchical linear modelling was used to test the moderating effect of FS, measured at the salesperson level, on the proposed relationships.
Findings
The results show that customers’ perceptions of salespeople’s listening behaviour mediate the relationship between customers’ perception of salespeople’s empathy and RQ with the bank. Moreover, the positive relationship between salespeople’s empathy and salespeople’s listening behaviour, and the positive relationship between salesperson’s listening and customer’s RQ with bank are attenuated by the salesperson’s FS.
Originality/value
This paper examined the effects of the salesperson’s empathy and listening behaviour on the quality of customer relationships with the bank. Moreover, dyadic data show that such effects are influenced by variables related to the bank’s salespeople, such as FS. The findings show that under high FS conditions, salespeople with high listening skills will have negative effects on their customers’ RQ with the bank.
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This paper aims to answer a prominent question that arises for the manager who wishes to recruit a salesperson to maintain and develop a portfolio–customer relationship: Under…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to answer a prominent question that arises for the manager who wishes to recruit a salesperson to maintain and develop a portfolio–customer relationship: Under which condition is this decision profitable for the firm? Though several authors have underscored the importance of the salesperson's role in the creation of purchaser–salesperson relationships, in the author's knowledge, no study has focused on the salesperson's profitability in the relationship approach. This issue is significant for sales managers because the investment in sales force is greater, and the relationship profitability with customers is not guaranteed.
Design/methodology/approach
Econometric model based on transaction cost economics theory and dynamic exchange between firm, salesperson and a customer. Specifically, this model links between customer life value, firm financial value, salesperson cost and relationship time.
Findings
Three zones are identified that can characterize the dynamic salesperson profitability. It was shown that only one zone can be profitable to the firm.
Research limitations/implications
This result is important because it can solve the equivocal posit between scholars with regard to the success or the failure of relationship marketing. This study also specifies the critical retention rate, the critical duration time in which a salesperson begins to be profitable.
Originality/value
In the author's knowledge, this study is the first to use an exchange model to show in which conditions the salesperson will be profitable in relationship marketing.
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