Toward a Theory of Business Buyer-Seller Similarity

By J. Lichtenthal, Thomas Tellefsen. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2001

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper proposes an expanded view of industrial buyer-seller similarity. Past research indicates that business buyers may judge their degree of similarity with a salesperson in terms of observable characteristics (physical attributes and behavior) and internal characteristics (perceptions, attitudes, and values). The synthesis of findings suggests that internal similarity can increase a business buyer's willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson's guidance and, therefore, increase the industrial salesperson's effectiveness. In contrast, the literature reviewed also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity exerts a negligible influence on a business buyer's perceptions or a salesperson's effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to think alike than to look alike. An implication is that managers will not derive a substantial benefit from simply matching salespeople and buyers demographically. Indeed, improvements to a sales force's performance can be gained by hiring salespeople who possess the flexibility to identify potential areas of internal similarity and training them to build upon those issues to foster positive perceptions with buyers.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b5527ecc744116839287ffe6b88cb9b697c8daf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Lova Rajaobelina
2. Dietmar Harhoff
3. Nikolaus Franke
4. Marc Gruber
5. Jasmin Bergeron

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Lova Rajaobelina
2. Dietmar Harhoff
3. Nikolaus Franke
4. Marc Gruber
5. Jasmin Bergeron
6. E. Thompson

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Lova Rajaobelina
2. Nikolaus Franke
3. Marc Gruber
4. Martin Schreier

Citations in the corpus

• What you are is what you like—similarity biases in venture capitalists' evaluations of start-up teams (2006, background): “For example, Lichtenthal and Tellefsen (2001) provide an overview of studies that explain the different outcomes of buyer-seller relationships by their actual and perceived similarity.”
• Antecedents and consequences of buyer‐seller relationship quality in the financial services industry (2009, background): “Buyer-seller similarity has been examined in a large number of empirical studies across literatures in marketing and social psychology, and has been debated in sales research for over 35 years (Dwyer et al., 1998; Evans, 1963; Lichtenthal and Tellefsen, 2001).”