Micro Enterprise Retailer Salespeople’s Self-Evaluations of Sales Performance: A study of two countries, one from Central America and one from Western Africa

Abstract

Salespeople are crucial piece of the puzzle in micro business retailing environments of developing countries. With no formal training and education in salesmanship, they practice the modern version of the customer relationship management to achieve success. However, empirical studies regarding the salesperson’s performance in such environments in developing countries are scarce. We contribute to the existing literature by extending the application of the behaviour-based salesperson self-evaluation into micro enterprise environments of under-researched countries in Central America and Western Africa. Using an empirical data collected from two developing nations, we examined the importance ratings of the Bush et al. (1990) behaviour-based scale dimension in micro enterprise retail shops in Ghana and Guatemala. Our results indicate that the dimensionality of the behaviour-based salesperson performance evaluation scale holds in both countries. In addition, the importance of some of the performance evaluation dimensions differed in the countries studied.

Keywords

• Micro enterprise retailers
• salesperson performance
• behaviour based
• Ghana
• Guatemala