Gratitude in Buyer-Seller Relationships: A Dyadic Investigation

Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2017.1352447

Research demonstrates that customer gratitude is linked to increases in sales revenue, share of wallet, sales growth, and customer commitment. Businesses that express their gratitude toward customers are rewarded with loyalty, and they help customers feel good and prevent the emergence of negative emotions. As boundary spanners, salespeople are uniquely positioned to develop powerful emotions, such as gratitude, toward and within their customers.

This brings up two questions for Chief Sales Officers:

1. What is the role of salesperson gratitude in buyer-seller relationships?
2. Does salesperson gratitude motivate behavior that is beneficial to firms?

A paper published in 2017 uses moral affect theory to examine the effects of salesperson gratitude and customer gratitude on downstream relationship outcomes. The authors examine salesperson gratitude and its effects on salesperson prosocial behaviors, customer gratitude, and customer commitment.

The study addresses the role of both salesperson gratitude and customer gratitude in promoting customer commitment. The use of moral affect theory helps examine how the grateful emotion in the salesperson drives behaviors that elicit gratitude in the customer. The authors also explore whether salesperson extra-role behaviors are more or less effective for customers depending on the length of their interpersonal relationship with the salesperson. This helps them examine how relationship length impacts the effect of salesperson behaviors.

The authors conducted a dyadic investigation by surveying business-to-business salespeople and customers of a large transportation logistics firm that maintains customer accounts varying in size, location, and length of time purchasing from the firm. The responses helped them assess the indirect effect of salesperson gratitude on customer gratitude, as well as the indirect effect of salesperson extra-role behaviors on customer commitment through customer gratitude. Next, they studied the effects of the interaction between salesperson prosocial behaviors and relationship length on customer gratitude. Lastly, they examined the interaction between salesperson information sharing and relationship length.

The results indicate that salesperson gratitude impacts customer gratitude and customer commitment through the prosocial behaviors that occur as a result of the salesperson’s gratitude toward the customer. The study also indicated that salesperson extra-role behaviors serve as a catalyst for propelling customer relationships forward and that salesperson information sharing serves as a tool to maintain the relationship over time.

The findings contain important lessons for Chief Sales Officers across industries:

• Salespeople should be encouraged to foster relationships with customers for which the salesperson can develop gratitude over time. This includes providing salespeople with opportunities to document or discuss gratitude in the workplace.
• Understanding how a salesperson’s emotions impact their interactions with customers aids sales managers in training and coaching their salespeople. Something as simple as mindfully controlling negative facial expressions can be useful in managing the contagious effects of emotions.
• Salespeople are encouraged to engage in extra-role behaviors with buyers to save time and resources by accelerating relationship-building.