orientation (i.e., task orientation) (Novicevic & Harvey, 2001), people orientation (Jordan & Cartwright, 1998), and service orientation (i.e., customers’ treatment, employee empowerment, and service aspects (Lytle, Hom, & Mokwa, 1998)). However, customer orientation presents some side effects and risks; thus, it requires an effective management in order to be profitable. Customer oriented salespeople have to face and overcome the opportunity cost that arises when short-term sales are sacrificed to maintain customer satisfaction and increase the probability of future purchase (Pettijohn et al., 2002; Saxe & Weitz, 1982). In addition, they also have to face the costs supported and time spent in gathering information about customers’ needs, rather than selling (Saxe & Weitz, 1982; Singh & Koshy, 2011). Saxe & Weitz, (1982) individuated two main circumstances that permit the customer-oriented salespeople to profitably engage in the sales approach. They need independency and availability of resources in order to be able to tailor offering to customers’ needs. More specifically, they need the ability to understand the needs and accessibility of a broad range of products that can be offered as solutions. Then, they need to be able to establish a free flow of information, result of a close and trustworthy relationship between the seller and the customer. Indeed, the salespeople are required to represent a source of trustworthy information and a partner with which the customers collaborate in order to identify first, and then solve, their needs (Jaramillo et al., 2007). By doing so, they are similarly able to reduce the cost per sale and increase satisfaction for both parts (Saxe & Weitz, 1982). To sum up, Saxe and Weitz propose two situational factors that determine the customer orientation’s benefits to overweigh its cost: (1) relations, which is
Sensation seeking and Customer orientation Salespeople’s CO is expressed by the intention of establishing with the consumers a long-term relationship, applying the marketing concept (Kotler, 1972), motivation (Thakor & Joshi, 2005) and empathy (Bagozzi et al., 2011; Dawson, Bloch, & Ridgway, 1990) in order to understand the customers. All these actions require the salespeople to take risks (Joshi & Randall, 2001; Pettijohn et al., 2002; Saxe & Weitz, 1982): they bet on uncertain long-term sales result instead of maintaining a short-term focus (Bagozzi et al., 2011). Moreover, in a knowledge-intense environment salespeople must be knowledge broker (W. Verbeke et al., 2011) and the activity of sourcing information involves tradeoffs and risk-taking: time spent gathering knowledge might be better spent on actual selling (Joshi & Randall, 2001; Saxe & Weitz, 1982). The literature explain that CO is also related to “opportunity recognition” (Bonney & Williams, 2009), so the ability to spot the customers’ needs and connect those needs with their categories and solutions (i.e., knowledge brokering; (W. Verbeke et al., 2011). Scholars have been found the ability of recognize the opportunity to be correlated with the genetic component of novelty seeking: the human reward system and the activation of the dopamine pathways in the brain (Bagozzi et al., 2011). Consequently, Customer oriented salespeople need to be novelty-seeking, condition that allows them to recognize the (sales) opportunity. In fact, Bagozzi et al., (2011)