The impact of performance measurement diversity on customer-oriented selling behavior

Abstract

Motivated by recent high-profile cases of salespeople behaving ‘badly’ (i.e., unethically, aggressively, or misleading toward customers), we investigate traditional behavioral controls to examine the specific relationship between performance measurement choices and selling behavior with a survey of 207 business-to-business salespeople. Borrowing from attention-based theory and the theory of planned behavior, our findings suggest that sales management can encourage more pro-customer behavior by using a more diverse performance measurement schema to influence the underlying drivers of customer-oriented selling behavior, including salesperson attitudes and subjective norms. This is particularly important in transactional selling environments where the use of diverse measures has the strongest effect on pro-customer attitudes and customer-oriented selling behavior.