The concept of customer centricity is frequently debated by sales and marketing researchers and practitioners. However, to date no validated scale exists that measures to what extent customers perceive companies as customer centric. Against this backdrop, drawing on prior literature, qualitative interviews, and a customer survey (N ¼ 246), the authors develop and validate a measurement scale for perceived customer centricity. In addition, using matched survey and financial data from industrial customers (N ¼ 1,089), the authors examine antecedents and consequences of perceived customer centricity. Results show that customers perceive firms as customer centric if the supplier is customer oriented on both the overall firm level and the salesperson level. Furthermore, perceived customer centricity is strongly linked to customers' loyalty intentions and objective sales revenue, particularly if customers perceive a firm to exhibit high prices. Thus, this article equips managers with a validated and easy-to-use measurement that allows monitoring a firm's progress toward customer centricity.

Although customer orientation is widely endorsed as a crucial salesperson characteristic, little is known about its effect in price negotiations with customers. This study rectifies this omission and argues for its ambiguous effects. While customer-oriented salespeople create value for customers that enables them to reduce price concessions, they may overly focus on customers’ needs and, in doing so, hesitate to defend against such requests. Results of two quantitative studies and one preliminary qualitative study reveal that customer-oriented salespeople do not unconditionally benefit from their created value in price negotiations with customers. That is, salespeople effectively leverage their created value to negotiate prices with customers only if their sales managers instill confidence that high prices are justified. Furthermore, we find that profit-related incentives reduce undesired consequences of salespeople’s customer orientation in price negotiations.

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