The Impact of Customer Motivation on the Customer-Salesperson Relationship

摘要

Due to its relevance in profit generation, practitioners and academics alike have dedicated years of thoughtful effort to answering questions most relevant to the practice of professional selling and sales-centric organizations (Spiro and Perreault, 1979; Frazier and Summers, 1984). One example of such work is the inquiry into the role that influence tactics play in the customer-salesperson relationship (Kholi and Zaltman, 1988; McFarland, Challagalla, and Shervani, 2006). Spiro and Perreault (1979) suggest that "the concept of influence implies an effort to move the attitudes or behavior of a target person (the customer) in a pre-specified direction." As a result, an important task salespeople face is convincing prospects that a certain product or service is suited, above all others, to the needs of the buying firm. An antecedent to influencing buyers in this way is a strong customer-salesperson relationship.