Elaboration on potential outcomes (EPO) and the consultative salesperson: investigating effects on attributions and performance |
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Authors: | Christopher Plouffe Frederik Beuk John Hulland Gergana Y. Nenkov |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Marketing, College of Business, New Mexico State University, BC # 338, MSC 5280, 1320 E. University Avenue, Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001, USA;2. Department of Marketing, College of Business Administration, University of Akron, Polsky 569C, 259 South Broadway Street, Akron, OH 44325-4804, USA;3. Terry College of Business, 104 Brooks Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA;4. Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Fulton Hall 442, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3800, USA |
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Abstract: | Past work has found that salespeople make very different attributions when describing successful versus unsuccessful sales. In this article, we explore the influence of elaboration on potential outcomes (EPO), a relatively new individual-specific personality construct that has not been previously examined in the sales context. We show that salespeople's predisposition to engage in predecision elaboration on the potential outcomes of their sales activities across the sales cycle has an important impact on their selling attributions and on their performance, even after accounting for the effects of self-efficacy and trait competitiveness, two other person-specific variables that have been heavily examined in past research. Juxtaposing survey responses with objective sales performance data from 301 salespeople drawn from two sales organizations, the results show that EPO and the more heavily examined variables help to systematically explain salespeople's attributions for success but are only weakly linked to attributions for failure. Moreover, the results show that EPO itself explains a modest, but nevertheless promising, portion of variance in sales performance. |
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Keywords: | elaboration on potential outcomes (EPO) attribution theory sales salespeople sales performance |
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