ARTICLE REVIEW

Article Review

Article Review

This paper supports the need for a market-oriented industrial salesforce. So, in the first part, a definition of industrial salesforce market orientation is proposed, distinguishing between a philosophical approach and a behavioural approach. In the second part, an empirical research is carried out to propose and analyse diverse instruments to measure market orientation in an industrial salesforce context. Unidimensionality, reliability and validity are studied. The aim is to offer some guidelines to sales managers in order to implement market orientation at salesforce level.

During the last decade market orientation has been one of the most important focuses in marketing literature and research. The development of knowledge of market orientation has concentrated mainly on three areas: conceptualization, effects on business performance and the moderating role of certain variables in the environment (Greenley, 1995; Harris and Piercy, 1997; Borghgraff and Verbeke, 1997). The said areas have been studied in depth and, today, companies ask for guidelines or advice to help them reach, consolidate or maintain market orientation within them.

Many authors underline the importance of researching aspects connected with the implementation of market orientation. However, the work has concentrated on the role of top executives in this implementation. This work analyses one of the functions of every company: sales. It is the salespeople in a company who play the key role in interacting with the customers, offering and obtaining useful powerful market intelligence (Doney and Cannon, 1997). In addition, the performance and behaviour of a market-oriented salesforce can make a difference to the offer, by providing additional opportunities by means of the value-added differentiation (Humphreys and Williams, 1996). Thus, salesforce is one of the company's basic resources useful to convey the company's message to the customer and also the link between the customer and the company (Donalson et al., 1997).

The above justifies studying the implementation of market orientation at salesforce level. Besides, salesforce is considered to play the most important role in industrial contexts compared with other marketing elements, which justifies the study of salesforce in industrial corporations.

In this context, the purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual delimitation of a market-oriented salesperson, at the same time that diverse measure instruments are analysed. The final objective is to offer some guidelines to sales managers if they want to have a market-driven salesforce. In this sense, the measure instruments can be useful as a guide for the implementation of market orientation among their salespeople.

The paper first reviews the main contributions into market orientation literature. In this sense, we try to analyse these contributions in the sales context, providing a definition of a market-oriented salesforce. Second, the paper presents diverse market orientation measurement scales and supports an integrated instrument of them.

After the background and theoretical foundation, the research approach is described, the results are shared and discussed, and the managerial implications, limitations and future lines of research are drawn.

Only a small number of works have centred on the combined study of market orientation and ...