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Working Paper

The SOCO Scale: A Measure of Customer Orientation of Salespeople

Robert Saxe and Barton A. Weitz, 1982 [82-113]

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This reprint from the Journal of Marketing Research (Vol. XIX, August 1982) stems from a research project funded by the Marketing Science Institute. As such it has been included in the Institute's report series.

Subject
Customer-oriented personal selling.

Type of Report
Development and validation of a measurement scale.

Objective
To produce a scale that measures the degree to which a salesperson engages in customer-oriented selling and to relate use of this sales approach to salesperson effectiveness and environmental characteristics.

Method
Proposes scale items on basis of literature survey and interviews with 25 sales personnel; assesses content validity of items using expert judges (11 sales managers and 13 marketing academics); selects best items via survey of convenience sample of 208 salespeople (both retail and wholesale level); assesses scale properties and the relationships among use of customer-oriented selling, characteristics of the sales situation, and sales performance through a second survey of 95 salespeople.

Conclusions

• The final SOCO (Selling Orientation-Customer Orientation) scale, containing 24 items, has a high level of internal consistency and a moderate degree of stability over time. As rated by the expert judges, the scale is composed of a broad and representative range of items.
• The distribution of respondents' SOCO scores is skewed toward a high level of customer orientation.
• Providing some evidence of the underlying validity of the SOCO scale, questions assessing a salesperson's typical selling situation indicate that high SOCO scores are significantly (but not strongly) related to the degree to which the customer-salesperson relationship is long-term and cooperative and to the ability of salespeople to help their customers.
• Further evidence of validity is provided by positive and significant correlation between customer orientation and performance for those salespeople with high ability to help and long-term, cooperative customer relations.

Target Audience/Applicability
Salesforce managers and academic researchers.

Related MSI Research
Forthcoming is a collection of articles, Churchill, Ford, and Walker (eds.), Research Perspectives on the Performance of Salespeople.

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