Impact of customer orientation on sales performance and a research

Today's competitive environment requires appropriate strategies for business sustainability and profitability. Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive strategy and process of acquiring, retaining, and partnering with selective customers to create superior value for the company and the customer. It involves the integration of marketing, sales, customer service, and the supply-chain functions of the organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness in delivering customer value. Customer relationship management is vital for companies because of customer retention strategy. Customer satisfaction with customer loyalty is also important. Customer orientation is the core of customer relationship management. Increase in market share, competitive power, brand image, brand loyalty and profitability can be possible in the long run by the help of customer orientation approach. Customer orientation is the application of finding proper product/service for customer needs. It aims to understand customer needs and respond to customers quickly with the right solutions. The earlier information from the market, the earlier respond to customer means cathing the competative advantage. The customer orientation is recognized as the cornerstone of the functioning of the companies. Customer relationship management and market orientation are both in relation to this. Customer orientation can be regarded as the application of marketing concepts in salespersons service and customer interaction. Customer-orientation behaviour focuses on the extent to which salespeople practice the marketing concept by helping their customers make purchase decisions that will satisfy their needs. Customer orientation usually reflects a salesperson's confidence to satisfy customer need and his or her willingness to interact and service them. Customer satisfaction is the perception of customer which is resulted from the salespeople behaviour to customer, because of this customer orientation and sales interaction is an important notion.. "Personal selling implies direct communication with potential buyer. This is the process of developing relationships, detecting needs and adjusting appropriate products to these needs. But it is also a process of telling the benefits by providing data, reminding and convincing. Salespeople are the core of personel selling and they gain relationships with customers directly by representing the company. The importance of the personal selling function depends partially on the nature of the product. As a general rule, goods that are new and different, technically complex or expensive require more personal selling effort. The salesperson plays a key role in providing the consumer with information about such products to reduce the risks involved in purchase and use. It is important to remember that for many companies the salesperson represents the customer's main link to the firm. In fact, the salesperson is the company. Therefore it is imperative that the company take xvi advantage of this unique link. Through the efforts of the successful salesperson, a company can build relationships with customers that continue long. Personal selling is an integral of the marketing system, fulfilling two vital duties: one for customers and one for companies. Lacking relevant information, customers are likely to make poor buying decisions. For example: Doctors would have difficulty finding out about new drugs and procedures were it not for pharmaceutical salespeople. Second, salespeople act as a source of marketing intelligence for management Salespeople play a key role in the formation of longterm buyer-seller relationships. As the primary link between the buying and selling finns, they have considerable influence on the buyer's perceptions of the seller's reliability and the value of the seller's services and consequently the buyer's interest in continuing the relationship. Salespeople play a key role in the formation of longterm buyer-seller relationships. In the sales framework salespeople have an important role for achieving sales targets. So that, customer, company, product, competitors knowledge, sales techniques, communication skills are the main properties which salespeople should have. Marketing concept and accompanying approach to personal selling view the initial sale as merely the first step in a long-term relationship-building process, not as the end goal. The relationship-building process which is designed to meet the objectives contains six sequential stages. These stages are (1) prospecting, (2) planning the sales call, (3) presentation, (4) responding to objections, (5) obtaining commitment/closing the sale and (6) building a long-term relationship. Sales performance evaluation mainly aims to assess the performance of salespeople. It shows the current performance results and also give clues for the future performance situtaions. From the sales view, sales performance management is vital for the success of individual performance and company performance. From the business point of view sales performance management mainly deals with understanding market trends in an improved fashion and better targeting of sales across territories. It also takes into account sales turnovers and fairly allocating sales opportunities to improve their productivity. Concentrates on better management of sales resources, and realistic quota settings with less risk of attainment short falls, or unforecasted sales incentive exposure. Faster implementation of sales plan, more equitable territories and quotas, and improved confidence in their pay for performance for better sales satisfaction. Sales performance management helps salespeople to be aware of what has been expected from them, what should they have done to achieve firms' goals. It also helps salespeople to realize the current situation and their training and development needs. The performance of a sales representative's behavior on customer contact will directly impact on a customer purchase and repurchase action. In addition, a high customer orientation in a salesperson's service can lead to enhance customer satisfaction and it will also help an organization to develop a long term relationship with a customer. Customer orientation makes salespersons to adjust their selling methods as the environment changes. As a result, when salespersons encounter different customers and different selling situation, they can act with an appropriate response. A salesperson's adoption to customer orientation method results in the increase of customer satisfaction. Customers' expectation is positively correlated to xvii salesperson trust, satisfaction, and interaction. Customer orientation is positively correlated with customer relationship is affected to salesperson performance. There are many factors effecting sales performance of the sales person, these factors like motivation, skill set, aptitude, knowledge, job satisfaction, role perception , personal factors like age, sex, height etc, ego drive, and empathy towards the customers are inherent in the individual sales person. Among these factors, skill set have been broadened into competencies, which include knowledge, skills and abilities of the sales person. Research on competencies have shown that there are three to four broad categories which influence their performance; these are selling skills, general management skills, technical skills, interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence of the person. Interpersonal skills reflect the contribution of sales person's ability to form and develop relationship with their clients to create profitable and productive relation among both the parties. From the customer relationship management perspective, customer satisfaction is becoming more important in effective sales organizations and understanding customer needs and serving right products/solutions to customers have long term contributions to both individual and company sales performance. From this point selling skills and personel sellings, customer orientation and sales performance interactions are examined in this study. The main topic of this thesis is the effect of customer orientation on sales performance and evaluating the selling skills, customer orientation and sales performance interactions The aim of the study is to investigate selling skills effect on customer orientation approach of salesperson and customer orientation effect on salesperson sales performance in todays competative business environment. In addition to this, the study aims to examine the effects of gender, income level and level of education, age and experience on sales performance. In the study, literature review includes customer relationship management, market orientation, customer orientation, sales management and sales performance management. For the analysis part, pharmaceutical industry salespeople were given online survey questions including selling skills, customer orientation and performance scales questions. 130 people participated into the survey. The answers were evaluated by the help of SPSS statistics programme. Reliability analysis, factor analysis, regression, correlation, t-test, ANOVA and mediating variable analysis were used to analyze the answers. The analysis has showed that there is a positive meaningful relationship between selling skills and customer orientation approach and also there is a positive meaningful strong relationship between customer orientation and sales performance. In addition to this, the analysis has showed that total experience in sales process have a positive effect on performance. The experience in the same company also have positive effect on sales performance. There is no difference in performance with respect to sex. Age is a factor that effect sales performance, which can support the hypothesis about the experience effect. Participants who are in the 31-40 age interval have more performance points than the 21-30 age interval. Education level factor does not effect performance meaningfully. Income level also effects sales performance positively. Mediating variable analysis has showed that customer orientation is a partial mediating variable between selling skills and sales performance. Because of this, customer orientation has an important role for identifying sales performance and customer orientation is a concept which requires compentancy in selling skills. Customer-oriented approach of salespersons are more likely to enhance future sales, and therefore should be considered as a measure of salesperson's performance. Since understanding and fulfilling customer needs, creating and delivering value to customers, maintaining customer satisfaction and strong relationship with customers increase the probability of sales in future, these customer oriented activities constitute salesperson's performance and its outcome as effectiveness. As a result, companies' customer orientation approach returns with customer satisfaction and loyalty. The short term sales targets can not contribute to the company in the long run. Customer orientation is a strategy that collects information from the customer about their needs and uses this information to create a strategy for the needs of the customers. Customer orientation approach includes understanding customer, analyzing the customer profiles, serving the right solution to the customer and it is possible with the selling skills competency. To become more customeroriented may be the first step to have satisfied customers who are loyal. This is closely related to CRM and market orientation, when using them, companies can have satisfied employees, partners, and achieve the higher performance. Customer orientation and selling skills are significantly and positively affected to sales performance. In customer orientation respect, salespersons nowadays need not only to provide the best service to customers but also to pay more attention to knowledge management to increase their competitiveness. Therefore, if a salesperson is not customer oriented, his or her performance must be affected. In addition, customer orientation has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between selling skills and sales performance. It implies that it is not enough only to have selling skills to satisfy a customer needs, and it is also important for salespersons to have customer orientation approach in order to achieve high sales performance results. In others words, customer orientation becomes more important to salespeople Salespeople who have greater selling skills and decision-making capabilities, are more adept at recognizing and understanding customers' needs, problems, and questions, so that they are more customer oriented. The competency in selling skills increase the customer orientation approach, and customer orientation increases the sales performance. Salespeople who exhibit strong orientations toward satisfying their customers are likely to improve their overall selling performance. Salespeople's individual sales performance would increase the incentives and motivation of the salespeople and these effects the company's business performance. Because of these reasons customer orientation is also important from the companies' perspective. Sales teams should be trained and supported in selling skills and customer orientation by their companies. Keywords: Customer orientation, sales performance, selling skills