A personal construct analysis of adaptive selling and sales experience

Customer orientation is a key to successful marketing strategies. In personal selling, customer orientation has been shown to be related to the quality of the customer‐salesperson relationship (Saxe & Weitz, 1978). Adaptive selling (Weitz, Sujan, & Sujan, 1986) is a theoretical perspective that suggests sales performance is related to salespeople's ability to shift their customer orientation, by adapting their behavior to different customers in different situations. This article presents personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a framework for understanding how sales personnel perceive and adapt to customers. An interview technique known as laddering (Gutman, 1982; Hinkle, 1965) is used to elicit these constructs from sales personnel. Results of the interviews are compared across levels of sales experience. Consistent with the Sujan, Sujan, and Bettman (1988) findings relating sales effectiveness and breadth of knowledge structures, we find that the number of years of sales experience is related to the breadth of constructs obtained from the laddering interviews. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.