A Classification of Industrial Buyers: Implications for Sales Training

Abstract

Organizational buyer behavior literature, although abundant, tends to provide little help to sales practitioners in the way of identifying what kinds of buyers salespeople might encounter. This information should be especially useful in preparing sales personnel to call on prospects—they could tailor their sales call strategy to the kind of customer they call on. Little published research, however, has explored the kinds of industrial buyers. This paper (a) reports the results of a study that examined industrial buyer types, and (b) discusses sales training implications of dealing with each kind of buyer identified in the investigation.