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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This research examined the relationships between improvisational behavior, adaptive selling behavior and sales performance of direct sellers in Thailand. This research also investigated whether these relationships are moderated by the degree of challenge orientation and sellers' knowledge about the products.

The data were collected through a survey with sellers from a subsidiary of a multinational corporation located in Bangkok, Thailand (n = 172). Partial least squares–structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Results from data analysis revealed positive relationships between improvisational behavior, adaptive selling behavior and sales performance. The relationship between improvisational behavior and adaptive selling behavior, as well as the relationship between adaptive selling behavior and sales performance, significantly depended on the degree of challenge orientation and the sellers' knowledge about the products.

The data were collected using self-report measures; the sample was sellers from a single sales organization, and cross-sectional data were used for the analysis. Overall, this study is the exploratory research that does not intend to prove the causal effect of improvisational behavior, but rather to provide new insight on some conditional factors that influence its effectiveness.

It is essential for sales organizations to ensure that their sales force has adequate improvisational skills to handle sales adaptations effectively during unexpected sales situations. Some training may be offered to the sales force to develop these imperative improvisational skills.

The results regarding the moderating effect of challenge orientation and product knowledge provided additional insight to prior research about the potential conditions that influence the effectiveness of improvisational behavior and adaptive selling behaviors.

This research aims to apply the contingency approach to explore the effectiveness of the improvisational behavior of salespeople on their sales performance by considering the moderating role of functional customer orientation.

Survey data were obtained from a sample of 227 salespeople in Bangkok, Thailand. The data analysis was implemented by partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The overall results indicate that the association between improvisational behavior and sales performance is significantly contingent on the level of functional customer orientation that salespeople exhibit. For salespeople with high functional customer orientation, improvisational behavior clearly shows a positive association with sales performance. In contrast, for salespeople with low functional customer orientation, improvisational behavior appears to have a negative association with sales performance.

This research broadens the knowledge in the literature by showing that improvisational behavior of salespeople needs to be combined with functional customer orientation to yield a benefit to their sales performance.

Studies have shown that customer orientation has a substantial impact on a business's success. This study examines the effects of positive personality on salespeople's proactive customer orientation (PCO) and responsive customer orientation (RCO) by incorporating the effects of job enthusiasm and transformational leadership.

A questionnaire survey is conducted. A total of 511 questionnaires are received from Taiwan's life insurance salespeople. Partial least squares (PLS) regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that positive personality influences PCO and RCO both directly and indirectly through job enthusiasm. The effect of transformational leadership is also found to be significant. Financial service companies should be concerned about the important role of positive personality and transformational leadership in promoting job enthusiasm, PCO and RCO among salespeople.

Previous studies mostly focused on the direct relationship between customer orientation and organizational outcomes, neglecting the role of individual personality. This gap leaves us wondering how a positive personality influences a salesperson's proactive and responsive customer orientation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the mechanisms of a positive personality, job enthusiasm, and transformational leadership on salespeople's PCO and RCO.

This exploratory research aims to examine the commonalities and differences in how buyers and sellers perceive and characterize an effective sales presentation in an attempt to present issues/themes that may help start a dialogue into the theoretical underpinnings of effective sales presentations.

The paper consists of a qualitative study involving both salespeople and buyers.

The study uncovers three common themes of an effective sales presentation – knowledge, adaptability, and trust – but exposes a gap between buyer and seller expectations and perspectives of these themes.

The findings provide insight for business‐to‐business (B2B) salespeople and managers as to what buyers and sellers consider characteristic of an effective sales presentation.

By focusing on how the two main parties to an exchange – the buyer and seller – define what makes an effective sales presentation, this paper adds knowledge to the area of B2B sales research.

Salespeople are at the forefront of the external environment where they act as the first responders to critical events and their resulting business turbulence. How the salesforce responds to turbulence is, therefore, of great interest both theoretically and in practice. The paper aims to rekindle interest in agility selling, which is the most adequate behavioral sales model to exploit environmental uncertainty.

An organizational autoethnography complemented with data from in-depth interviews with key salespeople involved in turbulence resulted in the development of eight case studies.

Salespeople use agility selling through four possible responsive roles. They amplify, innovate, cooperate or mitigate turbulence to exploit its ensuing opportunity or minimize its negative effect for both the supplier and the customer. The article enhances the agility selling model by putting three core abilities in the forefront: (1) forecasting turbulence from critical events, (2) responding to changes quickly and adequately and (3) exploiting changes as opportunities.

The article argues that critical events are the cause of the turbulence that the salesforce must deal with before it hits the dyad. Agility selling represents an untapped research opportunity in business-to-business sales, and sales management, as well as within the overall agile organization.

Sales organizations would greatly benefit in implementing training of agility selling’s core abilities because responsiveness is a valuable tool for salespeople in times of turbulence.

The study is the first to empirically demonstrate the existence of agility selling.

Drawing on social information processing theory (SIP), this paper examines whether and how humble leadership affects employees' service improvisation (ESI) in the hospitality industry. Further, the study investigates the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating role of creative self-efficacy (CSE).

To test the proposed relationships, the study adopts a cross-sectional design, administering questionnaires to 456 frontline staff in Egypt’s hospitality industry across three main sectors: restaurants, hotels and travel agencies. SPSS 27 and AMOS 22 were used for statistical analysis.

The study reveals a positive relationship between humble leadership and ESI, partially mediated by psychological safety. Furthermore, CSE not only strengthens the relationship between psychological safety and ESI but also enhances the indirect effect of humble leadership on ESI via psychological safety.

The study offers valuable insights for practitioners in the hospitality industry. To boost ESI, organizations can incorporate humble leadership attributes into their leadership development programs. Fostering a psychologically safe workplace would facilitate the positive impact of humble leadership on ESI. Recognizing CSE as a pivotal moderator underscores the importance of strategically selecting and developing employees with high CSE. These insights aim to cultivate a more service-oriented and effective workforce in the hospitality industry.

This study significantly contributes to leadership research in the hospitality industry by uncovering a previously unexplored link between humble leadership and ESI. Exploring psychological safety as a mediator and CSE as a moderator enhances our comprehension of how and when humble leadership influences ESI.

This paper aims to identify and report the differential effects of activity control and capability control on role stressors, which subsequently affect salespeople’s job satisfaction and sales performance.

Drawing on job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, the authors defined active control and customer demandingness as the job demands and capability control as the job resource, and designed their relationship with role stressors, which are indicated as role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload. The authors enrolled a sample of 223 industrial salespeople from pharmaceutical companies. After collecting the data, the authors used structural equation modeling using AMOS to test and estimate causal relationships along with a two-step approach to examine the interaction effect. The authors have also tested the simple slope of two-way interactions. All of the measured variables were identical to those used in previous studies.

The study findings indicate that behavior-based control can be counterproductive. Reducing activity control can decrease role stress, increase job satisfaction and improve job performance; increasing capability control, however, can reduce role stress and increase job satisfaction and performance. It is also important to acknowledge the external environment of the sales context in which behavior-based control is most effective: whereas high customer demandingness and capability control are related to reduced role stress, high customer demandingness and activity control are related to increased role stress.

Sales managers should recognize that different control management regimes reinforce or mitigate salespeople’s job stressors and outcomes under specific conditions (i.e. work environments marked by higher or lower customer demandingness).

Drawing on JD-R theory, the research shows that a behavior control (i.e. activity control and capability control) has differential, and even opposite, psychological consequences.

This paper examines the effect of improvisational behavior of entrepreneurs on firm performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand during the economic crisis following the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also explores external factors in terms of competitive intensity and internal factors in terms of financial and human resources possessed by firms that could enhance the impact of improvisational behavior on firm performance.

A self-administered online questionnaire survey was used to collect the data from the random sample of 312 SMEs in Thailand. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

The analysis supports the positive relationship between the improvisational behavior of entrepreneurs and firm performance. Moreover, the moderating effect analysis shows that the positive impact of improvisational behavior on firm performance tends to be stronger for firms that encountered a higher level of competitive intensity and for firms that possessed a higher level of financial and human resources.

This research extends the knowledge from prior research by confirming some moderating factors that could strengthen the benefit of improvisational behavior during the crisis.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between organization image, awareness effort, customer demandingness, self-efficacy and self-rated performance among salespersons of Islamic banking products in the UAE. It also explores the mediating role of awareness effort and self-efficacy, using a theoretical framework derived from social cognitive theory.

Data are collected by surveying salespersons in a mixed bank (a conventional bank with an Islamic banking department) in the UAE. The researcher uses structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

The research concludes that customer demandingness positively affects awareness effort, awareness effort positively affects self-efficacy, self-efficacy positively affects performance and image positively affects salespersons’ self-efficacy and performance. Furthermore, the study highlights the mediating role of awareness effort and self-efficacy in the model.

The sample consists of 217 salespersons working in the same bank, covering three cities in the UAE. Hence, the rest of the country is not included.

The study shows the importance of awareness efforts in achieving better performance. It also demonstrates the importance of addressing customer requirements in the banking environment. Furthermore, it illuminates the role of organization image in enforcing salespersons’ self-efficacy and performance.

The paper sheds a light on salespersons’ personalities and the factors that reinforce their performance and self-efficacy.

The research is an empirical study that addresses the relationship between performance, self-efficacy, image, awareness effort and customer demandingness in Islamic banking in the UAE.