Influence Tactics for Effective Adaptive Selling

Abstract

The adaptive selling literature identifies effective salespeople as those who match their influence tactics to suit the characteristics of buyers. However, prior research is largely silent on the specific influence tactics that salespeople use and the effectiveness of these tactics across different types of buyers. The authors propose a theoretical model that uses Kelman's (1961) underlying influence processes of internalization, compliance, and identification to identify the seller influence tactics that salespeople use and to assess which of these tactics will resonate with three types of buyers: task-oriented buyers, interaction-oriented buyers, and self-oriented buyers. The authors test their model with data from 193 bidirectionally matched buyer-seller dyads. The results strongly support the theoretical model and suggest that buyers are more complex than originally presumed. However, salespeople seem to recognize this complexity and use the combination of influence tactics prescribed by theory for persuading these types of buyers.

Managing relationship gaps: A practitioner perspective

“…The second course of action aims at making the customer adopt the solution offered through influence strategies aimed at getting the counterpart to change (McFarland et al, 2006) and selling tactics (Dubinsky and Rudelius, 1981). Influence strategies are either coercive (e.g., threats) or non-coercive (e.g., information exchange and recommendations) strategies (McFarland et al, 2006).…”

“…Influence strategies are either coercive (e.g., threats) or non-coercive (e.g., information exchange and recommendations) strategies (McFarland et al, 2006). More concrete selling tactics include personal visits, writing letters, asking questions, using dramatic efforts to get attention (Dubinsky and Rudelius, 1981), and "visualizing" the value of service offerings (Kindström et al, 2012).…”

When does salespeople’s customer orientation lead to customer loyalty? The differential effects of relational and functional customer orientation

“…Task-oriented customers are highly goal-oriented in sales conversations and prefer to accomplish the buying task as efficiently as possible (McFarland, Challagalla, and Shervani 2006). Here, we expect a functional customer orientation to have an above-average effect on customer loyalty with task-oriented customers because it matches their communication preferences (Williams, Spiro, and Fine 1990).…”

“…In our choice of moderators we draw on Sheth (1976), who proposed looking at style of communication and content of communication as context variables when analyzing buyer-seller interactions. Regarding the former, we consider customer communication styles (McFarland, Challagalla, and Shervani 2006). Regarding the latter, we turn our attention to product characteristics (e.g., product individuality, product importance, product complexity, and brand strength).…”

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.…”