SCHOOL OF BUSINESS & MANAGEMENT: Selling and the customer

In personal selling, the inspirational appeal (IA) is a widely promoted tactic that aims at stimulating customers' values and ideals, thereby evoking emotions and arousing their enthusiasm for a product. However, whether IAs in fact improve or undermine salespeople's success in sales talks remains controversial. Therefore, this study examines consequences and key contingencies of IAs in customer-salesperson interactions in a retailing context, using multisource data from several retailing industries for three quantitative studies, comprising a total sample of 590 customer and 174 salesperson responses.

This research draws on effectuation theory and service dominant logic to develop the concept of effectual selling. Effectual selling is focused on resource integration, stakeholder interaction, and value co-creation under environmental uncertainty. The effectual selling perspective developed here is consistent with the emerging service ecosystem view. As such, it is holistic and dynamic. Broadly, this investigation represents the longstanding and continuous effort to understand and articulate the important and evolving role of the salesperson.

Frontline employee authenticity has been investigated in relation to both potentially positive and negative outcomes, but largely from the employee perspective. The current paper aims to investigate frontline authenticity in a sales/service context from the customer perspective, specifically examining the influence of adaptive selling in relation to a customer’s perception of salesperson authenticity. Effects on customer’s perceptions of final benefits and value are examined.