SELLING EFFECTIVENESS: A DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE AND CATEGORICAL PROCESS PERSPECTIVE

The dissertation examines factors affecting salesperson qualification of clients. Specifically, the research investigates how the cognitive structure of declarative knowledge differs between successful and unsuccessful salespeople. A categorization process model is also developed and tested to further ascertain how the organization of knowledge impacts successful and unsuccessful salespeople's ability to classify sales leads.;The categorization findings indicate that successful and unsuccessful salespeople alike follow a two-stage categorization process of matching the sales lead to added attributes retrieved from memory when identifying moderate matches to the category prototype. Moreover, the degree of match to the basic level category prototype, and not the subordinate level category prototype, has the greatest main affect on the number of attributes used. Finally, it is shown that successful and unsuccessful salespeople disagree regarding the most appropriate classification of approximately one-fourth of the sales leads. This finding suggests that differences in declarative knowledge organization content and structure do impact classification decisions, and further suggests that as much as one quarter of the unsuccessful salesperson's sales efforts may be misdirected selling to prospects to whom the successful salesperson would not approach, or failing to sell to prospects to whom the successful salesperson would approach. Differences in classification accuracy potentially account for a significant proportion of the exhibited variation in performance among members of the sales team.;The major declarative knowledge findings indicate that successful and unsuccessful salespeople: (1) have similar declarative knowledge content for categories; (2) exhibit convergence regarding the most and least important discriminating category attributes, but show little or no agreement in the structuring of intermediate category attributes; and (3) display differences in stored attribute values felt descriptive of category members. In addition, the successful salesperson more evenly distributes importance weights across category attributes.