Organizational drivers of salespeople's customer orientation and selling orientation

The practice of customer-oriented selling (COS) has been identified as a key variable in an era of relationship selling and consultative selling. However, compared with the "traditional" selling orientation (SO), COS requires greater expenditure of effort by the salesperson in customer interactions. As a consequence, salespeople have to be motivated to engage in this mode of selling, but, unfortunately, factors that motivate customer orientation are still not well known. Our study develops and tests a model of organizational drivers of COS and SO on a sample of 326 managers. Such organizational drivers refer to the company culture, structure, strategy, and systems. We also analyze the effect of COS and SO on the creation of superior customer value.