To Be or X-Be, That is The Question

Academic frameworks about sales and selling is an area that is sometimes overlooked, thought to be an innate skill, or simply considered by some to be unworthy of "serious" study.

Yet the ability to approach sales and sales management, or at a more basic level, to develop relationships and influence others through a formal process is something that has been of interest to businesses probably since the word "business" was invented.  One such example is Dale Carnegie's original 1937 text "How to Win Friends and Influence People" showing that the study of human behavior and the importance of developing one's people skills in an authentic way are critical to success in many fields but especially sales.

More recently, the publication of Exchange Behavior in Selling and Sales Management (2008) by Sheng and Guergachi attempts to develop a real framework that managers can apply and measure.

Exchange Behavior (X-Be) introduces some interesting indexes including:

• The Relating Status Index
• The Attitude Index
• The Confidence Index

In developing/measuring one's "Relating" status, the ideal path would be to progress toward a "partnership" stage where a company rep and client can work together after building some degree of trust with each other.  The "Attitude" we are interested in is that of the client's interest in buying and happiness with past purchases through the company.  While sales reps may find informal ways to measure their own "confidence" that a client is committed to making a purchase by tracking things such as public acknowledgements of the value of the product.  

Each of these areas provide important insights about how to measure what may often be considered intangible elements.  This in turn should help sales teams and managers plan customer relationship strategies, their selling process and deliver better results.