Relationship between Salesperson Performance and Understanding of Customer Decision Making

A multistage model of the process by which an industrial salesperson influences a customer's preferences is introduced. The relationship between a salesperson's abilities during the two initial stages—impression formation and strategy formulation—and relative sales performance was examined. Industrial salespeople's perceptions of their customers’ brand attribute perceptions were matched against the customers’ actual perceptions, and a normative change strategy model was matched against the salespeople's reported change strategies. Variations in these abilities accounted for 20% of the variance in actual field sales performance.