Understanding the determinants of sales success and sales failure has organization wide implications, ranging from an improved salesforce to improved corporate performance. However, a paucity of research on sales failure has resulted in an under-conceptualized field largely built on assumptions. This research proposes to overcome salesforce failure attribution biases by collecting data from the industrial buyer’s perspective. Thirty five post-mortem interviews with procurement decision makers from buying organizations were collected following a failed sales proposal. The context of these failed sales proposals was for multi-year industrial service key account contracts (>$5 Million). The result of this naturalistic inquiry is a model which outlines the determinant attributes of sales failure: price, adaptability and relationship-potential. An experimental design was conducted following this exploratory research in order to test the derived drivers of sales failure and success, as well as provide a trade-off analysis of the three emergent sales proposal themes. Results indicate that a lack of adaptability has the strongest impact on the sales failure outcome variable, as well as buyer characteristics have a potentially moderating impact on the relative trade-off weights between price/adaptability and price/relationship-potential.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:scholarworks.gsu.edu:marketing_diss-1015 |
| Date | 13 May 2010 |
| Creators | Friend, Scott B |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University |
| Source Sets | Georgia State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Marketing Dissertations |
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