Emily A. Goad, former Illinois State University Professor was faculty in the Department of Marketing and the Professional Sales Institute. Goad holds a Ph.D. in marketing (minor in statistics) from the University of Texas at Arlington. Throughout her doctoral program, Goad has been recognized by multiple marketing societies as a rising talent in marketing academia. Specifically, she is a 2011 and 2013 Doctoral Fellow for the National Conference in Sales Management; winning best paper awards both years. In addition, she is a 2013 Society for Marketing Advances Doctoral Fellow. Goad has also been recognized by the University of Texas at Arlington for her research and teaching; she received the 2013-2014 best doctoral student research award for the Marketing department and the 2013-2014 College of Business Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate award.

Her research interests include customer orientation, salesperson listening, conflict management, and salesperson job performance. Goad has published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management and the Journal of Business Research; as well as five different papers accepted at national conferences. Furthermore, Goad reviews for the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, AMS World Marketing Congress, National Conference in Sales Management, and Society for Marketing Advances.  

Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Goad worked approximately 8 years in sales and financial services, specifically investor relations, auto finance underwriting, and retail banking. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Effective for Sales Performance

The concept of customer orientation (CO) is a focal construct in sales management research; indicating a desire for the salesperson to be a problem solver for their customers while maintaining a profitability objective for their firm. Saxe and Weitz (1982) introduced this concept to contrast the traditionally high pressure, and aggressive, salesperson (i.e., sales/selling orientation (SO)). Since the concepts of both CO and SO are foundational to personal selling and sales management, this research explores the impact of both within a complete framework that considers many managerial relevant aspects of personal selling. More specifically, this research is unique in that it statistically synthesizes (combines) prior research in order to develop a predictive model for important sales management research variables.

By combining prior research findings from 1982 – 2014, this research has the distinct ability to provide meaningful implications for managers due to its unique statistical technique. Specifically, by combining the correlations of prior research into a structural equation model, this research confirms that CO has a positive and direct impact on salesperson performance. Furthermore, findings indicate that CO impacts job performance through the mediating mechanism of adaptive selling. More so, this research indicates that adaptive selling is crucial in personal selling because the presence of it leads to a positive relationship between either CO (or SO) and job performance. This means that the ability of a salesperson to be adaptive is critical for performance, regardless of sales orientation. Thus, managers should pay particular attention to their salespeople’s abilities to be adaptive. In addition, this is an extremely important area for sales training.

 Overall, this research provides unique, and new, insights which highlight the importance of adaptive selling. “Regardless of whether the salesperson has a high level of concern for self (SO), or concern for others (CO), salespeople achieve their highest performance through adaptive selling.” (p.298).

Goad, Emily A., and Fernando Jaramillo (2014), “The Good, the Bad, and the Effective: A Meta-Analytic Examination of Selling Orientation and Customer Orientation on Sales Performance,” Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 34 (4), 285-301. *Nominated for JAMES M. COMER AWARD for Best Contribution to Selling and Sales Management (Theory) for the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management