Empathy and Grit Enhance Customer Oriented Selling

Abstract

This study assesses the impact of empathy and grit when applied by industrial marketers utilizing a customer oriented selling approach. Empathy and grit have been individually considered to be important in previous research but remain chiefly unexplored collectively. In this study, a sample of 240 business-to-business salespeople indicates empathy is directly related to grit and both are positively related to customer oriented selling. Grit partially mediates empathy and customer oriented selling and years of sales experience moderate the relationship between grit and customer oriented selling. This indicates sellers who seek an understanding of issues from the customer’s viewpoint and have the grittiness to persevere will help them engage in customer oriented selling to conquer objections, satisfy needs, build relationships, and ultimately achieve their sales goals. Consequently, empathy, grit, and customer oriented selling provide valuable and unique insights into business-to-business selling behaviors.

Keywords:

• Business-to-business sales
• empathy
• grit
• customer oriented selling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).