The Effect Of Different Types Of Customer Orientation And Its Influencing Factors On Sales Performance Under The Network Environment

The development of the Internet makes it easier for customers to get information,and what is more important is the transformation of current competitive model. Plenty of electric business enterprises have been emerging in this Internet age, while the traditional industries have also involved in the trend of "Internet plus". The network environment changes consumers' shopping habits and information acquisition habits.Consumers can collect comprehensive information about products and services at a lower cost and make the best choice under full comparisons. Changes in the purchase model also brought changes in the enterprise, and companies need to resort and establish customer-oriented service concept and service process. Although in any external environment, the core nature of customer orientation will not experience a qualitative change, but in different environmental conditions, its content and form of expression will show a great difference. The network environment has changed the marketing mode of enterprises and people's consumption behavior pattern. Therefore,the customer-oriented behavior process in the network environment also has the characteristics of heterogeneity. There are five main aspects: Cross space-time,Intangible,low cost and convenience,volatility and High efficiency.Competitions among enterprises are more intense under the context of the Internet compared to the traditional background. At the same time, the importance of customers has become more prominent and competitions among enterprises have turned to how to meet customers' needs better. In addition, the increased importance of customers makes the role of sales staff more important than ever. Sales staff is backbone in the development of enterprises, so studies on sales staff are of great benefit theoretically and practically. In a network environment, enterprises need to stand on the customer's point of view, which means the sales staff must establish a customer orientation in order to enhance the core competitiveness of their businesses.Customer orientation theory has been widely favored by scholars as a connected bridge between psychology and marketing management. Customer orientation theory is a "customer-centered approach", emphasizing the focus on customer's preferences,needs and satisfaction. Current researches of customer orientation theory have mainly discussed the concept, definition, content, measurement and impacts of customer orientation on the management and development of a business. Research results in these aspects are relatively abundant, which has produced positive influences.However, there are few researches on factors affecting customer's orientation and how these antecedents act on sales performance. There are also few studies on the impact mechanism,especially on the behavior, type,causes and consequences of customer orientation.The concept of customer orientation is relatively broad. Although there are researches on how to classify customer orientation and the impacts of its different types, there are almost no studies on the influencing factors of different kinds of customer orientation. In the network environment, in order to win the market competition, enterprises not only need to implement customer orientation,but also need to combine different situations to encourage employees to produce appropriate customer orientation, so the classifying the customer orientation and exploring its influencing factors are more conducive to meet today's increasingly personalized and complex customer needs, and can help enterprises more accurately meet the individual needs of customers, thereby enhancing the performance of enterprises. This paper focuses on making up the status quo of lacking research of customer orientation classification, and we divide customer orientation into functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation, and explore the influencing factors of these two kinds of customer orientation. Functional customer orientation is defined as a set of task-oriented behaviors that can help customers make satisfying purchase decisions,and emphases on task orientation may make the customer-employee interaction to obtain functional benefits. Relational customer orientation is defined as a series of patterns of behavior intended to establish interactive relationships with customers, and emphasizing relationships with customers may lead to customer-employee interaction gaining social benefits.In this study, the relationship between different types of customer orientation and its influencing factors and sales performance is systematically analyzed by combining qualitative research with quantitative research.This study has established a framework of and structural effects of customer orientation and discussed the interaction model and mechanism of "antecedents - customer orientation - sales performance" to give solutions to the former two questions. And this is based on the customer orientation theory, the control system theory, the regulatory focus theory and the network density theory in marketing management and consumer behavior. In this paper,a research method of grounded theory is used to explore the influencing factors of different types of customer orientation under the context of the Internet, and the initial conceptual model of the influencing factors of salespersons' customer orientation is constructed.On this basis,hypothesis has been proposed. The auther investigated 800 salespersons of 50 enterprises in Jiangsu Province and collected 452 valid questionnaires for this study. The structural equation model is used to analyze the data. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) This paper mainly discusses the influencing factors of functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation: the firm-level influencing factors(outcome control system, activity control system, ability control system), the team-level influencing factors (team network density) and the individual-level influencing factors (promotion focus and prevention focus). After the empirical analysis, it is found that functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation share some common influencing factors: the activity control system,the ability control system, the team network density, the promotion focus and the prevention focus. While the outcome control system can only affect the functional customer orientation and has nothing to do with the relational customer orientation.Although the prevention focus is positively related to the relational customer orientation, it is contrary to the negative correlation we have assumed. It can be seen that enterprise can take the above measures to promote their sales staff to produce the corresponding customer orientation when they choose a proper customer orientation according to the characteristics of customers and products.(2) Functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation have a positive impact on sales performance. In the past, some scholars have explored the choice of functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation in combination with the customer's communication style (task type or relationship type)and product individualization and importance. These studies focus on in what circumstances functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation is more conducive to customer loyalty. On the basis of these studies, this study explores what measures the company needs to take if the firm determines to choose which kind of customer orientation is based on the customer's communication style (or preference)or product characteristics and other factors. In this paper,through the discussion of three-level influencing factors, it is helpful to help enterprises decide what measures to improve the functional customer orientation, and what measures are conducive to enhance the relational customer orientation.(3) This paper also studies the mediation effect of functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation. After the hypothesis test, it is found that the mediating effects of functional and relational customer orientation are unique but have some same independent variables: the ability control system and the network density. Functional customer orientation plays a mediating role in the relationship between three antecedents (the outcome control system, the activity control system,the prevention focus) and sales performance; while the relational customer orientation has mediating effects between promotion focus and sales performance. This shows that different factors affect the sales performance in different ways. On the one hand,the sales performance will not have a significant improvement only with appropriate customer orientation but without corresponding measures. On the other hand, in order to better promote sales performance, enterprises should choose corresponding customer orientation when deciding the measures to be taken.(4) The analysis of the effective questionnaires of 452 salespeople shows that customer orientation is very important in a network environment,and different types of customer orientation can be better adapted to different contexts. After determining the type of customer oriention, what measures should the enterprise take to better enhance the sales performance and what measures can the enterprise take to cater to this customer oriention. The main purpose of this study is to help enterprises decide what measures are conducive to sales staff to form the type of customer oriention the firm need. This can help enterprises and sales staff to better meet the needs of customers in today's network environment and is beneficial for the development of enterprises.