The Impact of Personal Selling Orientation to Value Creation, Relationship Development, and Customer Satisfaction in Industrial Business

Industrial marketing is known as business-to-business (B2B) marketing and the process in the field is quite complex. Personal selling is chosen as one of the common type of promotion in industrial marketing. Though it is the most ancient art of sales ever in the history, it is proven to be an effective type of communication. While it is old-fashioned, personal selling become one of the most effective tool for generating the buying process, especially in building preferences, beliefs, and buying actions from B2B customers. Previous research in B to B relationship stated that customer orientation and selling orientation influenced customer satisfaction. It is also revealed that customer orientation and selling orientation will form "value" which will create a close relationship between salesperson and his customers since it has a positive influence between the two sides. This research aimed to investigate the influence of customer orientation and selling orientation to value creation, relationship development, and customer satisfaction on industrial business. The study was conducted in a stainless steel industry. Data collection of 120 respondents as the key person in the companies used purposive sampling method and analized using Path Analysis with LISREL 9.10. The result of this study leads and points to the direct relationship and indirect relationship between variables, where the direct relationship seen from the relationship between customer orientation to customer satisfaction, sales orientation to customer satisfaction, value creation to customer satisfaction, and relationship development to customer satisfaction.