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).
The authors' five-tier analysis provides a definition of adaptive selling, presents a framework for examining it, reviews previous research and explores capabilities and motivation that encourage its use. While defining adaptive selling as "the altering of sales behaviors during a customer interaction or across customer interactions based on perceived information about the nature of the selling situation," the authors contrast the flexibility of tru...