Determinants of Adaptive Selling as Dynamic Capacity of firms

Authors

Abstract

In recent years, the scientific community has deepened its research in the field of sales, exploring the characteristics and impact of adaptive sales on sales team performance, while in the discipline of strategic studies, the analysis and understanding of dynamic capabilities of firms as a mechanism to increase their competitiveness in changing environments, has also won a prominent place for both the academic and practical world. In this analysis, Adaptive Sale is exposed to different theoretical structural elements that distinguish it as ahigh-level Strategic Dynamic Capacity, incorporating characteristics that give it the potential to learn and accumulate skills from its internal competences in order to conduct itself in a flexible way through the dynamic changes of the environment. Throughout an integration analysis that exposes the similar characteristics of these seminal constructs, this review argues that the Adaptive Sale has, in a consistent manner with the definition of the theoretical framework of the Dynamic Capacities, three perspectives of approximation associated with the Life Cycle of Sales Management, in the general configuration of the firm's resources and in the specific nature of these capabilities, which translate into different cognitive abilities necessary to deploy behaviors and routines to detectopportunities and threats from the competitive environment. The article concludes that the Adaptive Sale, when considered as a dynamic capacity, has a role that projects it beyond a good practice of low order behavioral routines, constituting a mediating role of the Sales Orientations and with a clear impact in the management of the Sales Management to provide high value final offers that allow to achieve sustainable competitive advantages and superior performance.

Keywords:

Adaptive sale, Customer Orientation, Market orientation, Dynamic capabilities