Selling in the short term and building long-term relationship : how influence principles can help customer oriented sales[Vendre à court terme et construire une relation à long terme : les principes d’influence au secours de la vente orientée client]

Customer oriented (CO) salespeople are those whose priorities are to satisfy their customers and build long-term relationships with them. Closing a sale is supposed to be natural for a CO salesperson, in direct line with his value proposition adapted to his customers' needs without having to use persuasion tactics based on influence principles (IP's). However, this research shows through an experiment that CO salespeople conclude a sale more easily when they use IP's, and this does not threaten relationship quality. Hence we recommend that 1) sales culture should be based on a charter which promotes both CO and IP's; 2) salespeople should be trained in using CO together with IP's; 3) a control and compensation sales policy should be balanced between sales results and CO behaviors control. Keywords: customer orientation, influence principles, salespeople performance.