Are you looking for something specific or just looking around? Adaptive selling on the basis of customer shopping goals in retail sales

Abstract

A key advantage that brick-and-mortar retailers have over online retailers is their salespeople, who can adaptively interact with customers on a one-on-one basis. When starting an interaction with a customer, a retail salesperson generally first aims to determine their shopping goal (Hall et al., Journal of Marketing, 79(3), 91–109, 2015), often with questions such as, “How can I help you today?” Yet, little is known in the literature or in practice about how salespeople should adapt their sales approach based on customers’ shopping goals. This is unfortunate, because customers clearly want better help from salespeople, and the potential gains of doing so are substantial (Accenture, 2021; Hochstein et al., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1), 118–137, 2019). To address this limitation, this research focuses on the practice of adaptive selling in retail settings, in which salespeople adapt their tactics on the basis of customers’ shopping goals. Using information processing theory, we propose that matching sales influence tactics (SITs) to two aspects of customers’ shopping goals, namely goal specificity and product type (utilitarian vs. hedonic), improves purchase outcomes. Across a series of field and lab experiments, we demonstrate that purchase behavior and purchase intention are higher when salespeople use informational (emotional) SITs with customers who have a high (low) shopping goal specificity level, which we term the match strategy. The match strategy has a direct positive effect on purchase outcomes and an effect mediated by processing fluency on purchase outcomes, with product type serving as a moderator. This research concludes with specific, actionable recommendations for retail salespeople and managers.