Pengaruh ability to monitor, ability to modify terhadap sales-people performance melalui motivation to practice adaptive selling dan adaptive selling behavior dengan relationship initiative sebagai moderat or pada perusahaan distribusi bahan kimia industri (Business to business/ B2B)di Surabaya (Jawa Timur)

The research aimed to investigate and analyze the influence Adaptive Selling Behavior in Sales-people Performance, specifically in Business to Business Industry. The research also want to elaborate Relationship Initiative as Moderating Variable. The results of this research will help a company who is in Business to Business Industry to better understand how to maximize their sales force and to be able to create an efficient and effective training program for them. Being able to understand the concept of Adaptive Selling Behavior, will lead the sales-people towards a better way of doing their selling activity. Hard selling will only hurt the company’s image in front of customers, but value-based selling is believed to have a long-term relationship effect. In Business to Business industry, sales-people can not avoid a face to face meeting with their customers. During the meeting and negotiation with customer, sometimes what is happening is totally different with what the sales-people’s scenario already prepared. In this kind of situation, the sales-people must be able to monitor what is going to be happened and ready to modify their actions towards the new situation. The sales-people must be able to read and react, must be able to adapt their move. The study is a survey research directed to explain or confirm the causal relationships of all variables which was carried out by testing several hypotheses. Ability to Monitor, Ability to Modify and Relationship Initiative are used as exogen variables, while Motivation to Practice Adaptive Selling, Adaptive Selling Behavior and Sales-people Performance are the endogen variables. The data of this research is collected from chemicals distribution companies through a questioner. The unit of analysis in this research is the dyadic relationship between sales-people (138 respondents) and their customers (414 respondents). Finally, the data is analized using Structural Equation Modelling Software. The results are consistent with prior research, which indicates that questions regarding the efficacy of adaptive selling continue to exist. The contribution of this research is (1) a new strategy in selling called “Read and React” and (2) a proposal to develop an Adaptive Selling Training Program (ASTP)