Adaptive Selling

Adaptive selling, the manner in which the salesperson engaged in personal selling tailors the sales presentation to the customer, appears deceptively simple, so much so that it became an area for intensive sales research relatively recently. A look at some studies reveals complexities that both demonstrate its essential role in sales effectiveness and demand further research.

Perhaps because the one-on-one interaction of salesperson with customer dates back centuries to the earliest bazaars and markets of antiquity, this crucial connection was long taken for granted. When examined apart from often-studied areas of research such as role perception and motivation, sales ability has been treated as if it were an inborn and innate talent.

In their influential mid-1980s study (Weitz et al., 1986, pp. 174-191), three Journal of Marketing authors not only examine sales ability: through a careful analysis of the ways sales people learn to adapt their behaviors effectively in the personal selling situation, they find guidelines for developing useful strategies for training and managing sales people and improving sales performance.

As the authors state, personal selling is "the only communication vehicle in which the marketing message can be adapted to the specific customer's needs and beliefs. Sales people have the opportunity to do 'market research' on each customer and implement a sales presentation that is maximally effective for that customer" (Weitz et al., 1986, p. 174)

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tentatively applied mid-1980s theories about organizational culture to management of the adaptive sales situation, concluding that organizations that encouraged employee independence and experimentation and encouraged longterm employment would also provide the most supportive environments for adaptive selling. Building on this framework, later analysts attempted to develop tools for measuring both adaptive selling and the varying adaptive selling abilities of individual salespeople. Some researchers have begun to examine adaptive selling ability in the light of demographic factors such as gender, age, sales experience and education. A later paper by Barton A. Weitz, writing with another colleague, Rosann L. Spiro, attempted to build on his earlier research by developing a 16-item scale that would measure the degree to which salespeople practice adaptive selling. Initial hypotheses in this research identified several important factors that affected salespeople's adaptive selling ability: empathic ability, self-monitoring, social confidence and the salespersons' beliefs that their actions can have positive effects on the rewards they receive, or what Weitz and Spiro called "the locus of control" (Spiro & Weitz, 1990, pp. 62-64).

Category: Psychology - A