Customer Orientation’s Vital Importance to Achieve Sales Effectiveness

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.010How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Customer orientation, Interfunctional coordination, Competitor orientation, Salesforce performance, Sales organization effectiveness, SMEs

Abstract

Previous studies have found sales management control, salesforce characteristics and salesforce performance are considered as key drivers of sales organization effectiveness. There is a lack of studies emphasizing the importance of market orientation in relation to sales organization effectiveness, especially in the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) context. The research aims to investigate the relationship between market orientation components (i.e. customer orientation, interfunctional coordination, competitor orientation) and sales organization effectiveness. The respondents for this study were managers of SMEs in charge of the sales team. A descriptive research design was used to collect data from SMEs across Australia. Path analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that, for SMEs, customer orientation was found to be the key element of the three components of market orientation in terms of their impact on sales organization effectiveness. The results and managerial implications are discussed.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ken Grant
AU  - Hanny Nasution
AU  - Bill Pickett
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/23
TI  - Customer Orientation’s Vital Importance to Achieve Sales Effectiveness
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Business and Management Research (ICBMR 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 71
EP  - 78
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.010
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.010
ID  - Grant2020
ER  -