Sales Opportunity Crafting: Explaining Diverse Selling Approaches

Salespeople play a critical boundary-spanning role in establishing productive relationships with their buyers. In doing so, they employ diverse selling approaches that resulting in a wide range of customer experiences—some that align well with the overall marketing strategies and some that conflict with the intent of the organization. Several theoretical explanations for the variations in selling approaches, but no singular theory provide us a lens to understand how salespeople approach various selling opportunities. The primary goal of this inquiry is to compile the extant theoretical knowledge from various disciplines in order to develop a conceptual framework for future empirical research work. The research suggests sales opportunity crafting allows salespeople to selectively employ pre-established routines or improvise a task by reconfiguring its boundaries—physically, cognitively, and relationally. This research posits that the improvisation levels used by salespeople are determined collectively by their cognitive assumptions about the customer’s needs and their interaction levels with the customer.