Summary
In their comprehensive model of customer contact for services, George et al (1986) highlighted the importance of selling within any service context and suggested that personal selling is too important to be left to a tactical, implementation decision by lower level managers.
Given the importance of the relationship with the customer in the financial services industry, marketers have begun to focus on relationship marketing as a way to develop strong connections with customers.
According to the relationship marketing paradigm and the understanding of customer engagement in the twenty-first century, the sales force will be a critical driver of success in innovative nonbanks within the financial services industry.
The importance of technology in selling and sales management was depicted in a special issue of the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management that focused exclusively on research and practice in the use of technology in business to consumer selling (Crittenden et al , 2010).
Technology enables the sharing of information that can enhance communication within the sales force and between the sales force and the customer, resulting in a stronger sales force overall. Although technology cannot replace the human element of the sales process (Ahearne and
Rapp, 2010), technology mediation in personal selling could increase efficiency and effectiveness of salespeople and may enable organizations to restructure in such a way as to facilitate a more direct approach to selling a wide variety of products and services (Sharma and
Sheth, 2010).
As with every direct selling company, the key to success in the direct selling of financial services is the salesperson's ability to increase his/her sales volume via customer engagement. In studying relationship marketing from a customer's perspective, for example, Barnes (1997) surveyed 400 retail bank customers,