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E. T. Hall's (1976) conceptualization of high and low context cultures has surfaced in the literature as a driving force in determining buyers' and sellers' negotiation styles. We explore the effect low and high cultural contexts have on the relationship between international sales representatives' demographic characteristics and their cooperative negotiating styles. Exporters from the United States (low context) and the Philippines (high context) were sampled to study the effects of gender, educational level, and experience on the cooperative problem-solving approach to negotiation. Results indicated problem-solving levels between high and low context sample groups were significantly different but no gender differences were noted within the same cultural context. Our findings also suggested that cultural context moderates the relationship between the negotiator's experience and negotiation style. Negotiator experience had a greater positive effect on the cooperative style when negotiators were from the low context culture country.

Although widely recognized as essential to success, little research has focused on effective listening skills in the personal selling context. This paper reviews effective listening as seen in existing sales and communication literature. Further, it presents both a cognitive process model of the interpersonal listening process and a model that explicates the relationship between listening, adaptive selling and sales performance. In addition, a series of research priorities and research propositions are presented to stimulate future research. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

This paper proposes an expanded view of industrial buyer-seller similarity. Past research indicates that business buyers may judge their degree of similarity with a salesperson in terms of observable characteristics (physical attributes and behavior) and internal characteristics (perceptions, attitudes, and values). The synthesis of findings suggests that internal similarity can increase a business buyer's willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson's guidance and, therefore, increase the industrial salesperson's effectiveness. In contrast, the literature reviewed also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity exerts a negligible influence on a business buyer's perceptions or a salesperson's effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to think alike than to look alike. An implication is that managers will not derive a substantial benefit from simply matching salespeople and buyers demographically. Indeed, improvements to a sales force's performance can be gained by hiring salespeople who possess the flexibility to identify potential areas of internal similarity and training them to build upon those issues to foster positive perceptions with buyers., Introduction A ubiquitous issue facing industrial sales managers is the ongoing need to enhance sales force effectiveness. Researchers have attempted to identify variables that are positively associated with salesperson performance [...]

This study reports findings from an experiment designed to investigate how verbal exchange between a salesperson and a prospect influences sales outcomes of an initial sales encounter. One hundred ninety-six salesperson-customer dyads were videotaped controlling for sales situation variables. Findings provide support for the idea that elements of task and social disclosure differentially influence customer perceptions of interaction quality and business relationship potential. In addition, the study illustrates a methodology that can be used to investigate dyadic interchange., Introduction The two-way flow of information is what distinguishes personal selling from other forms of promotion (Weitz 1981). It is through the act of disclosing information to the other party [...]

Five bases of social power - reward power, coercive power, legitimate power, referent power and expert power are set out in this study of how sales managers' social bases of power affect job attitudes by sales personnel. Factors used in evaluating worker attitudes are job satisfaction and motivation, job performance, commitment to the organization and role conflict and ambiguity. Questionaires were given to salespeople employed by a small department store chain. Noncoercive power was found to have a better effect on personnel resulting in more job satisfaction.