Impact of Goal Orientation on Salespeople’s Adaptive Selling: the Mediating Effect of Perceived Sales Force Obsolescence

Adaptive selling is widely deemed as an essential factor for successful sales. In the literature, adaptive selling is defined as salespeople’ effort of “altering of sales behaviors during a customer interaction or across customer interactions based on perceived information about the nature of the selling situation” (Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan, 1986). Initial work on adaptive selling focused on developing and refining valid psychometric instruments of salespeople propensity to practice adaptive selling (e.g., Spiro and Weitz, 1990; Robinson et al., 2002). Much recent work has largely devoted to study the antecedents of adaptive selling, i.e., factors that are inductive, facilitate, and lead to more adaptive selling behavior (e.g., Boorom, Goolsby and Ramsey, 1998; Jaramillo et al., 2007; Levy and Arun, 1994; Park and Deitz, 2006; Park and Holloway, 2003; Porter, Wiener and Frankwick, 2003).