Salesmanship Skills and Sales Strategy Implementation
The Covid19 pandemic forced salespersons to adapt its “modus operandi” (Hartmann & Lussier, 2020; Luu, 2021; Rangarajan et al., 2021), providing challenges and opportunities for salespersons at different levels (e.g. human, task, technology, structure) (Hartmann & Lussier, 2020). Particularly in the real estate industry, salespersons worked under difficult circumstances, whereby digital sales interaction or limited face-to-face interactions were required. Covid 19 pandemic prompt the urgent need for real estate companies to change the physical store and adopt digital platforms for the multichannel retail business (Nanda et al., 2021). Therefore, the transition of salespeople's tasks occurred mainly in the way the operations were conducted (Rangarajan et al., 2021) as the basic salesperson functions remain the same. For instance, prospecting customers, interaction with customers, persuasion and negotiation, argumentation to surpass objections.
In fact, increased uncertainty during volatile times (such as Covid19), generally requires from the salesperson strategic capabilities to improve performance (Nowlin et al., 2018). For example, sales-influencing tactics, like persuasion, are important for converting leads to sales (Pöyry et al., 2017). The ability of persuasion to encourage the customer to make the final purchase decision is called salesmanship skills (Rentz et al., 2002). These skills also include prospecting for new customers, qualifying customers, identifying opportunities, present solutions to customers and close the sale (Rentz et al., 2002). The intermediary role of the salesperson demands the set of skills to persuade the owner of the property and the buyer (Ulaga & Kohli, 2018).
The implementation of the sales strategy refers to its execution and extension (Nowlin et al., 2018), but it also incorporates a question of resource deployment and allocation (Epler & Leach, 2021), which include new capabilities and skills (Epler & Leach, 2021; Luu, 2021). In fact, the skills are relevant because, in the real estate market, more experienced salespersons significantly increase the probability of a successful transaction (Waller & Jubran, 2012).
In line with the above rationale, we propose the following hypothesis: