Alignment, Misalignment and the Orientation of Sales Managers: a confrontation between Poland and Italy

TL;DRAbstract

In sales management literature different orientations of sales managers have been explored: hard selling, up-selling, consultative selling, relationship selling, customer-oriented selling, adaptive selling, among others. All of them share the idea that salesmen should act in order to satisfactorily meet and match the customer expectations and desires. However an in depth understanding of how sales managers interpret and frame this ―matching‖ with customers‘ needs/requirements is still missing. For such a reason, in this paper we will integrate the concepts of alignment and misalignment in sales management literature, in order to investigate if and how sales managers‘ interpretations of alignment and misalignment toward customers affect their orientation. This integration seems to be relevant, for a series of reasons. The first is that there is a growing body of literature in business to business marketing which asserts that managers‘ interpretations are relevant and strongly interlinke

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