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To understand better the determinants of selling effectiveness, the author proposes a framework for investigating the impact of declarative knowledge on the salesperson's ability to identify customers' product- and selling-related needs. The ability to identify properly the total set of customer needs is viewed as critical to the correct classification of sales leads into selling categories at the prospecting, sales call, sales presentation, and sale closing stages of the selling process. Differences in classification accuracy are proposed as key to explaining variations in sales performance. The differences in accuracy are posited to result from (1) the attributes believed to identify customer requirements, (2) the quantitative levels associated with the attributes, and (3) the degree of emphasis given to attributes in ascertaining client needs. Implications for sales managers are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.
David M. Szymanski (Fri,) studied this question.