A Study on Relationship Selling Behaviour and the Influence of the Brand with reference to Sales Performance Sathish M.*, Dr. Nandagopal R.** *Assistant Professor, PSG Institute of Management, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India **Director, PSG Institute of Management, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India Online published on 2 August, 2016. Abstract The organisation runs business with repeat customers by creating and maintaining good relationship with customer. It is essential to keep customers are happy to generate more lead from the customers especially in a competitive markets. Relationship selling behaviour has been identified as important practice for establishing a long term relationship between buyers and sellers. This relationship selling is the practice of marketing concept at individual level of sales persons besides this practice is the real base of missionary types of sales profile. The purpose of the study is to find out the influence of relationship selling behaviour of sales people on sales performance. The study focused on factors like customer oriented behaviour, sales oriented behaviour, adaptive selling behaviour, and listening behaviour. Insurance industry is more customer oriented industry and the networking skills are much more important in improving the productivity of insurance agents. After the focus group research we have included networking behaviour also one of the factor in relationship selling behaviour. The other main objective is how brand is influencing the sales performance of the sales force in Insurance Industry. We have focused on two leading brands like Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Private Ltd. based on their market share. Data is collected from full time insurance agents of these two companies in Coimbatore region. To make the study more rigorous we have collected data from two recent customers of each agent to validate the data which is provided by the agents. The study revealed that, agents who are well qualified have better listening skills and also can able to perform better to compare other agents. Brand also plays a vital role in getting more number of policies and also the commission varies from company to company. Selling is not a predetermined process and it varies accordingly from customer to customer thus agents who adapt to the needs of the customer have higher sales performance and generate more revenue. Sales Performance also varies demographically, agents who have understood this concept have had better sales performance. Another important findings is that relationship selling skills have contributed only 20% in LIC and 22% in ICICI to sales performance and there are so many unaccounted variables which is yet to be found. Top Keywords Relationship Selling Behaviour, Sales performance, networking skills, listening skills, customer orientation skill. Top |