Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Year
Journal
Spiro, Perreault,
and Reynolds
1977
IMM
Bonoma and
Johnston
1978
IMM
Weitz
1978
JMR
Plank and
Dempsey
1980
IMM
Dubinsky
Weitz
Dubinsky and
Staples
198081
1981
JM
198182
JPSSM
Historical Significance
Key Concept(s)
Personal selling consists of sequential steps;
exchange occurs if salespersoncustomer
strategies are compatible; salespeople and
customers are focal people in the process.
Salesperson perception of the purchasing firm
influences the selling approach used while
purchasing agent perception of the selling
firm influences the buying approach used.
ISTEA depicts a sequence of salesperson
activities that center on developing
impressions that influence a customers
choice decision.
Describes what the salesperson should
do; provides a basic framework for the
training of salespeople; model is admittedly
normative and salesperson focused.
PSP is made up of seven basic steps. Personal
selling is a systematic process; techniques
are salesperson skills, implying the PSP is
salesperson dependent.
Notes: IMM = Industrial Marketing Management; JMR = Journal of Marketing Research; JPSSM = Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management;
JM=Journal of Marketing.
necessarily sequential, steps: customer retention and deletion, database and knowledge management, nurturing the
relationship (relationship selling), marketing the product,
problem solving, adding value/satisfying needs, and customer
relationship maintenance.
The evolved seven steps perspective recognizes that the selling process unfolds over time as those involved in the process
interact and communicate. In todays relationship selling
environment, salespeoples individual skills, while necessary,
are not necessarily sufficient to single-handedly drive the personal selling process or sales performance (Colletti and Fiss
2006). Salespeople must work with their customers to access
the right information, to disseminate it to the right people,
and to coordinate the efforts of others to deliver value to the
customer. As such, customers are important contributors to
the success of the selling organization.
AN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION
PERSPECTIVE
Scholars have long recognized that the salesperson is not the
only one affecting sales performance (Riordan, Oliver, and
Donnelly 1977) and that the outcomes of sales efforts are the
result of interactions between buyers and sellers (Weitz, Sujan,
and Sujan 1986). An organizational theory and sensemaking
view of personal selling builds on research such as the cognitive
process and salesperson trait of interpersonal listening in the
personal selling context (Aggarwal et al. 2005; Castleberry and
Shepherd 1993; Castleberry, Shepherd, and Ridnour 1999).
It also focuses our attention on the impact of customers as
information providers through their words and actions as
equal communication partners for salespeople and important
organizational members of a selling firm.
Year
Journal
Historical Significance
Brooksbank
1995
JPSSM
Moncrief and
Marshall
2005
IMM
Smith,
Gopalakrishna,
and Chatterjee
2006
JMR
stner and
Godes
2006
HBR
Hunter and
Perreault
2007
JM
2008
Journal of
Relationship
Marketing
Key Concept(s)
Because personal selling is part of the
marketing process, it should share
customer-oriented philosophy and
methodology.
ESP is customer focused. Steps do not
necessarily occur for each sales call and are
not necessarily sequential; process occurs
through the work and efforts of many
people in a variety of positions in the selling
firm.
Firm actions and customer decisions interact
to produce outcomes; salesperson
performance is measured in terms of order
writing resulting from a single visit.
Customers provide valuable input
(information) to the personal selling process;
salesperson relies on those in the buying
organization to help achieve his or her goals.
Model divides selling activities into
administrative and relationship-building
tasks that drive relationship-building and
administrative performance.
Present a five-phase, demand-side process
starting and ending with the customer.
Notes: JPSSM = Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management; IMM = Industrial Marketing Management; JMR = Journal of Marketing Research;
HBR=Harvard Business Review; JM=Journal of Marketing.
make sense of the past, cope with the present, and plan for
the future (Dunford and Jones 2000; Jameson 2001). For
example, Rouleau (2005) interviewed and observed a sales
manager and a collections manager over a six-month period in
an attempt to interpret each managers routines and conversations in order to develop a practical perspective of strategic
sensemaking. The study uncovered specific routines that the
sales manager performed regularly to help prepare herself and
her customers for any changes. For example, one routine was
build the product symbolically. Here, the sales manager
wanted to create the proper atmosphere every time she gave
a product presentation. Other routines identified were to call
customers systematically and explore the feel of the market.
By thoroughly describing daily routines and conversations,
research is beginning to identify how individuals are enacting
a set of micro-practices (i.e., rules and behaviors) to help make
sense of situations in their environments.
Sensemaking for Uncertainty Reduction
Sensemaking is socially constructed with others (Smerek
2011). It occurs as people act and react within a larger social
context and as they engage in loosely coupled systems that
have norms guiding participants behavior (Weick 1979).
While organizing involves the process of looking back at
events and actions from ones environment and making sense
of what one observed and experienced, sensemaking involves
turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended,
that serves as a springboard into action (Weick, Sutcliffe, and
Obstfeld 2005), and that plays a pivotal role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal
organizations or elsewhere (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld
2005, p. 409). More simply, to make sense of something,
people first bracket events or accounts based on their own
experience and may eventually talk to others to make sense
of that experience. Ultimately, this process leads to rational
accounts of the world that reduce uncertainty about a situation and enable action.
A central theme of sensemaking is the reduction of uncertainty and equivocality through the deliberate effort to understand a situation. Uncertainly arises from a lack of information,
having inadequate understanding, and having undifferentiated
alternatives (Lipshitz and Strauss 1997). Equivocality consists
of having too many meanings from which to choose (Weick
1979). Ambiguous events or actions, once perceived, are
thought about and talked about by individuals who compare
them to past experience in order to search for their meanings
and to determine what to do next.
Sensemaking views making sense as reciprocal exchanges
between actors (enactment) and their environments (ecological
change) that are made meaningful (selection) and preserved
(retention) (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005). Enactment,
Figure 1
The Processes of Organizing and Sensemaking: Implications for Personal Selling
from their experiences and training programs to more effectively build relationships and to more efficiently move with
their customers through the selling process.
Ecological change represents the ever-changing environment that must continually be monitored and updated. For
the salesperson, ecological change may come in the form of a
change in customer habits or requirements, a change in buying
center membership or policy, the gain or loss of an account, or
the emergence of a new or the demise of an existing competitor. Figure1 uses the example of a change in customer ordering
as the ecological change triggering enactment, selection, and
retention for the salesperson. For customers, ecological change
examples include the exit of a current supplier from or the
entry of a new supplier to the market. Learning that a new
product has been launched or that the trusted salesperson a
customer has been dealing with is no longer with the company
are other examples of ecological change.
Enactment, selection, and retention are interrelated cognitive processes that contain two elementsassembly rules and
interlocked behavior cycles (Weick 1979). These two elements
are used to reduce equivocality or uncertainty in each of the
three processes. Assembly rules are rules or guidelines that
are used to construct the process based on past interactions
with others to remove equivocality (i.e., interlocked behavior
cycles). For salespeople, examples of assembly rules include
(1) effortwhich behavioral cycles require the least/most
effort; (2)frequencywhich cycles have occurred most often
in the past; (3)successwhich cycles have been most successful in the past for removing equivocality; (4)rewardwhich
cycles resulted in the greatest rewards; and (5) duration
which cycles can be completed in the shortest amount of
time.
Assembly rules are the means by which individuals register the amount of equivocality or uncertainty in any process
(Weick 1979). The greater amount of equivocality in an
environmental input (ecological change), the fewer number of
rules one activates to construct the process. For a salesperson
in the early stages of relationship building with a new client,
environmental input will be surrounded with much uncertainty because the salesperson is unfamiliar with the customers
requirements and behavior, making it more difficult for the
salesperson to determine the appropriate behavioral cycle to
use. In this case, only a small number of rules could be used to
construct the process. Conversely, in established salesperson
customer relationships, there is less equivocality surrounding
customer requirements and behavior, and thus less uncertainty
as to what a particular ecological change might mean and
how the salesperson should proceed. Therefore, salespeople
would use a greater number of rules to construct this process.
Ultimately, the more equivocal, or uncertain, the situation,
the less experience individuals have in dealing with it, which
means they have little to go on and few, if any, rules available
Figure 2
Example of SalespersonCustomer Organization as a
Contributor to Organizational Learning from Each Perspective
Figure 3
Depiction of the Uncertainty, Equivocality, and Opportunity for Ecological Change Surrounding
the CustomerSalesperson Organization that Occurs During Every Interaction and Affects Every Aspect
of the Evolved Selling Process (Based on Moncrief and Marshall 2005)
defining organization as something that happens when individuals communicate rather than something delineated by a
formal structure (Weick 1979), one can include customers as
sales organization members and the personal selling process
can be treated as an interpretation system (Daft and Weick
1984). The adoption of an organizational communication
perspective of personal selling allows for the development of
a conceptual framework within which to explore the influence
of customers communication cues on the personal selling
process and salesperson performance. Since customers are
among a salespersons most significant organizational others,
taking their communication cues into consideration may help
to account for more variation in salesperson performance
than the research has demonstrated in the past (Churchill et
al. 1985).
Managerial Relevance of an Organizational and
Sensemaking Perspective
Since some customers are more willing than others to invest
time and effort in an exchange relationship (Pine, Peppers,
and Rogers 1995), it is important to identify customer communication cues and to develop and compile accounts that
have positive effects on the personal selling process and on
sales performance. What is more, sales organization goals and
objectives with respect to particular customer relationships
are sometimes broader than mere sales volume. Encouraging
salespeople to identify and benefit from customer cues may
result in the facilitation of the selling process and contribute
to the achievement of other organizational goals and objectives, such as lowering costs, enhancing profitability, or gaining broader market access (Jones et al. 2005). Managers who
understand this concept can adapt their training programs to
focus on sensemaking and include emphasis on salesperson
attention, interpretation, and response to all customer communication cues.
Managers of customer-oriented firms should view customers not only as equal and active participants in the selling
and organizational learning processes as they interact with
salespeople but as an extended part of the company itself
(Sheth and Sisodia 2002). From a managerial perspective,
understanding which presale customer cues facilitate selling
efforts and help drive salesperson performance is important
not only for developing sales training but also for prioritizing customers. The theory of organizing and sensemaking
framework allows for the recognition that customer words and
behavior give salespeople something to work with, a basis on
which to proceed. As salespeople intently perceive, accordingly
interpret, and appropriately respond to customers cues, the
results should be a better understanding of customers sales
cycles, more accurate sales forecasts, and easier identification
of a firms best customers. What we may find is that those
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