The effect of customer innovativeness on the relationshipbetween the sales employees' selling performance for new and existing products

Abstract

This master thesis project provides an extension to an already existing conceptual framework, which addresses the ambidextrous orientation’s role of proactive selling behaviors and selling performance, where sales manager’s control and product newness are implemented. The focus in this study was to uncover the effects of customer innovativeness on the relationship between the sales employees’ selling behavior and selling performance for new and existing products, respectively. To fund an adequate knowledge base about key concepts (i.e. proactive selling behavior, customer innovativeness, selling performance and interpersonal relationships in sales context) a thorough literature review was conducted. Subsequently, different sets of scales were collected to form a survey consisting of 78 items, which in the end was translated from English to Norwegian. A quantitative online data collection was performed in a consumer electronics company in Norway (Euronics), resulting in 59 valid responses. SmartPLS was used to generate the necessary statistical models, and the significant results provide interesting key insights to the topic. Results show that customer innovativeness directly influences the selling performance for new products, and has a moderating effect on the relationship between proactive selling behavior and selling performance for existing products. Including to this, customer orientation was shown to have a positive and direct impact on the salespersons proactive selling behavior and on the selling performance for both new and existing products, and company tenure has a positive direct impact on customer innovativeness. Based on these findings, this study suggests that the salesperson can be very influential when selling existing products to less innovative customers. Furthermore, it is suggested that innovative customers will buy the new product, irrespective of the efforts of the salesperson. This has some managerial implications, such as the direction of the salespersons’ effort in selling situations. A number of limitations (e.g. temporal restrictions, scarce resources, subjective measurements, cross- sectional study design, etc.) was identified for this study, and suggestions for future research is provided.