Antecedents and consequences of adaptive selling confidence and behavior: a dyadic analysis of salespeople and their customers

Abstract

Personal selling is thought to be a very effective marketing vehicle. The notion of adaptive selling suggests that it should work better than any other means of communication because salespeople are able to develop a unique message for each customer. This research proposes a model of key antecedents and consequences of adaptive selling. In particular, we distinguish, measure, and model the attitudinal and behavioral aspects of adaptive selling, something that is encouraged but not thoroughly examined in the literature. Hypotheses are tested using data from 210 salesperson-customer dyads. The results indicate that a salesperson's perception of the firm's customer orientation has an effect on adaptive selling behavior through the salesperson's adaptive selling confidence, role ambiguity, intrinsic motivation and customer-qualification skills. Adaptive selling behavior increases salesperson's outcome performance, customers' evaluations of satisfaction with the product and with the salesperson, which enhance customers' anticipation of future interactions with the salesperson. The implications for management and theory are discussed.

Antecedents of adaptive selling among retail salespeople: A multilevel analysis

“…Research suggests that studies focusing on salespersons' perceptions of their own constructs, in addition to their perceptions of their organization, are likely to be somewhat more biased and intrinsically less holistic than studies such as ours where data is obtained from multiple sources (Román and Iacobucci, 2010). Our analytical approach also appropriately models the multilevel nature of retail sales organizations, thereby providing more robust results pertaining to the antecedents of adaptive selling.…”

“…There is general consensus that adaptive selling behavior is desirable. One primary benefit of ASB is that it results in improved sales performance (Román and Iacobucci, 2010). Consequently, significant research effort has been devoted to identifying factors that influence the practice of ASB (Román and Iacobucci, 2010;Giacobbe, Jackson, Crosby and Bridges, 2006).…”

“…One primary benefit of ASB is that it results in improved sales performance (Román and Iacobucci, 2010). Consequently, significant research effort has been devoted to identifying factors that influence the practice of ASB (Román and Iacobucci, 2010;Giacobbe, Jackson, Crosby and Bridges, 2006). These factors include role conflict, sales experience (Levy and Sharma, 1994;Siguaw, 1993), empathy, locus of control, management (Spiro and Weitz, 1990), intrinsic reward orientation, psychological androgyny (Goolsby, Lagace and Boorom, 1992), learning orientations, job satisfaction (Park and Holloway, 2003), pride, self-efficacy and civic virtue (Verbeke, Belschak and Bagozzi, 2004).…”

“…Furthermore, the firm-level variables we investigate directly relate to the third domain: salesperson role perceptions (Cravens, Lassk, Low, Marshall and Moncrief , 2004). Thirdly, by investigating both salesperson and firm variables in our study, we adhere to suggestions in the literature that factors specific to salespeople should be examined and modeled in the context of a firm's characteristics (Román and Iacobucci, 2010).…”

Adaptive Selling Behavior Based on Psychological Capital, Transformational Leadership and Job Satisfaction

“…This fact suggests that there is no appropriate technique to be applied in every sales situation (Omar, Jusoff & Moh Ali, 2009) [13], thus each salesperson is required to analyse each sales situation that he or she is facing. According to Roman & Iacobucci (2010) [14] salespeople must be able to behave adaptively and confident, they have to adapt their strategy to customer's communication style (McFarland et al, 2006) [15], more detail, Spiro and Weitz (1990) [5] explain that the salesperson who has a high adaptive selling would perform different types of sales style and able to adjust to the conditions that he or she is encountering. On the other hand, if salesperson who lacks the adaptive selling would only fixated on the sales styles that he or she knows and apply it on any situation that he or she is encountering.…”