All Salespeople are (not) Created Equal: Customers’ Views on a Creator, a Getter, and a Taker

Although the idea of classifying sales jobs is around for some time, literature typically makes recommendations to managers that refer to the “generalist” salesperson. However, sales practice has advanced significantly away from such a generalization, developing more specific types of sales jobs, from order-takers to more complex order-getters and order-creators. While all three categories fall into the general sales jobs, the job demands vary substantially, as well as the resources needed to perform the everyday tasks of these job types. This means that recommendations related to sales “generalist” may not fully apply to any of these sales job types. To understand the differences between the demands and personal resources required for customer success in different sales jobs, this study uses job demands-resource theory (JD-R) to examine how perceived helpfulness influences customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, and the role of emotion regulation in sales encounters when customers are faced with order-takers, order-getters, and order-creators. To test this, we present a series of studies involving a total of 270 B2B customers. We find that helpfulness and regulation of emotion have different direct and interactive effects on customer satisfaction, and ultimately on customer loyalty across the three different types of sales jobs.