Harish Sujan

Knowledge, Motivation, and Adaptive Behavior: A Framework for Improving Selling Effectiveness

The authors propose that adaptive selling is influenced by salespeoples knowledge of customer types and sales strategies as well as their motivation to alter the direction of their behavior. Perti...

Knowledge Structure Differences between More Effective and Less Effective Salespeople

A study of salespeople working for a telephone marketing operation indicates that more effective (above average) salespeople have richer and more interrelated knowledge structures about their custo...

Marketing the Unfamiliar: The Role of Context and Item-Specific Information in Electronic Agent Recommendations

Electronic agents have the capacity to help consumers discover new products and generate demand for unfamiliar products. This article explores how consumers respond to recommendations of unfamiliar products made by electronic agents. Two studies using simulated music shopping agents show that (1) additional recommendations of familiar products serve as a context in which unfamiliar recommendations are evaluated; (2) when the presentation of the recommendations makes unfamiliar and familiar products appear similar, evaluative assimilation results; and (3) when additional information about unfamiliar products is given, consumers discriminate them from the familiar products, which produces evaluative contrast. These results establish that information that leads to higher evaluations when context is absent can lead to contrast and lower evaluations in the presence of attractive contextual recommendations.

The Practical Know-How of Selling: Differences in Knowledge Content Between More-Effective and Less-Effective Performers

Results of both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of salespeople indicate that more effective and less effective salespeople differ systematically in their knowledge of sales strategies, and to a lesser extent in their knowledge of customer characteristics. For the sales situation examined, more effective salespeople use specific, problem solving-oriented strategies to sell to customers and underlying, functional characteristics to describe customers; less effective salespeople use global, relationship-oriented strategies to sell to customers and surface structure, less functional characteristics to describe customers.

Doctors As Salespeople: Strengthening Relationships With Patients To Motivate Better Self-Care

As a result of a greater focus in sales management practice on customer loyalty than on making the sale and even on customer satisfaction, sales research has turned its focus to questions of what strengthens salesperson-customer relationships (Fenwick, Porter and Crosby 2001; Weitz and Bradford 1999). Considering doctors as salespeople and patients as their customers, in this research we ask if stronger relationships motivate the customer (the patient) to take better self-care. In addition to diagnosing illnesses and prescribing medication, doctors need to be agents of lifestyle change. A significant proportion of their patients have lifestyle illnesses, such as hypertension and diabetes, and need to improve their diet and exercise to get well. Doctors regularly prescribe diet and exercise changes but tend to achieve only a 40–50% compliance rate (Toussi, Fujioka and Coleman 2009), although failure to comply is often costly—in terms of wellbeing—to the patient. Failure to comply is also costly in terms of health care costs, as it leads to more visits to the doctor’s office and more diagnostic testing. Improving doctors’ ability to persuade their patients to take better self-care is of considerable importance.