Any questions? Questioning skill as a selling tactic for sales students

Purpose of the Study: It is important for sales educators to provide sales students with skills that lead to immediate performance benefits for the early stage of their career. This paper investigates the performance benefits of questioning skills, customer orientation (CO) and adaptive selling (AD) for sales students.Method/Design and Sample: Dyadic survey data was collected from 62 sales encounters between sales students selling to real business-to-business customers. Hypotheses were tested using OLS regression.Results: Sales students and customers rate questioning skills similarity but have very little agreement about CO and AD. Using sales student ratings, CO interacts with questioning skills to improve customer purchase intention and AD does not improve performance. Using customer ratings, only questioning improves purchase intention but not CO or AD. Value to Marketing Educators: Educators should include questioning skills and CO in their curriculum to provide immediate performance benefits to sales students. AD is important but does not have immediate performance value. When using 360-degree evaluations, educators should be aware that student and customer ratings of CO and AD will likely disagree and have a different impact on performance.