Buyers’ Perceptions of Salesperson Tactical Approaches

Abstract

At the strategic level, the role of the industrial salesperson has been described as managing a portfolio of different buyer– seller relationships. This study identifies specific sales tactics (i.e., customer-focused, competitor-focused, or productfocused) that support the development of these strategic relationships. Data gathered from a national sample of industrial buyers was used to examine the differential effects of three sets of selling techniques. These differences tend to be contingent on the buyers’ position within that firm. When a buyer occupies a higher level of authority within his or her firm, customer-focused approaches tend to garner higher responsiveness ratings.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.