Predicting the Level of Salesperson’s Performance in Encouraging Customers to Use Appropriate Shopping Strategies in Sports Clubs

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Sport Management, Faculty of Sport Sciences, Arak University, Arak, Iran

2 Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Arak University, Arak, Iran

3 Department of Sport Management, Faculty of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The customers of a sports club are among the important pillars of its survival. In this paper, with the help of data mining and machine learning methods, a framework is presented to predict the level of effectiveness of salespersons’ performance to encourage customers of clubs to choose an appropriate shopping strategy. This framework uses a set of data on the topics of idealized influence behavior, inspirational motivation behavior, intellectual stimulation behavior, individualized consideration behavior, and smart selling behavior, as its inputs. In the proposed framework, first, the data is refined using the Pearson criterion, and invaluable questions/features are removed from the data set. There are five levels of effectiveness in our questionnaire, and each of them has a different number of records in the data set. So, in the second step, the data set is balanced using repetition, SMOTE, and Int-SMOTE methods. The Int-SMOTE balancing method is introduced in this paper for the first time. It is a SMOTE method with integer outputs. Finally, using different classifiers, we predict the level of effectiveness of salesperson's behaviors in encouraging customers. Evaluating the models indicates that the different models have been able to correctly identify the level of effectiveness of salesperson's behaviors between 76.16% to 96.82%. Also, we confirm our findings about the effects of different salesperson’s behavior to encourage customers using several other published papers.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Akbari, M., Aletaha, S. H., Farkhondeh, M., Pourrajabi, A. “Investigation of the Effect of Role Characteristics and Personal Factors on the Performance of the Sales Force (Case Study: Pasargad Insurance offices in Gilan)”, Insurance Research, 2017, 1(2), 115-143.
Akbari, M., Moradipour, S. “Horses for courses: B2B salesperson performance: the role of their characteristics and promotion efforts”, Middle East Journal of Management, 2021, 8(4), 297-318.
Bayaa, A., Goedegebuure, R., Jones, S., “Drivers for the adoption of relationship selling behaviors among B2B sales staff in the GCC”, Innovative Marketing, 2009, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp:7-21.
Brefeld, U., “Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics”, Springer, 2019.
Chawla, N. V., Kevin, W. B., Lawrence, O. H., Kegelmeyer, W. P., “SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique”, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2002, Vol. 16, pp: 321-357.
Douzas, G., Bacao, F., Last, F., “Improving Imbalanced Learning Through a Heuristic Oversampling Method Based on K-Means and SMOTE”, Information Sciences, 2018, Vol. 465, No. 1, pp: 1-20.
Dwayne, D. C. D., Allard, C. R. G., Van, B. V. R. M., “Effects of perceived employee emotional competence on customer satisfaction and loyalty”, Journal of Service Management, 2013, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp:5–24.
Dyreen, D. D., “The Influence of Salesperson Leadership as a Customer Interaction Behavior on Sales Performance”, Ph.D. Dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, 2008.
Fernández, A., Garcia, S., Herrera, F., Chawla, N. V., “SMOTE for Learning from Imbalanced Data: Progress and Challenges, Marking the 15-year Anniversary”, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2018, Vol. 61, No. 1, pp: 863-905.
Fletcher, T. D., Major, D. M., Davis, D. D., “The interactive relationship of competitive climate and trait competitiveness with workplace attitudes, stress and performance”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2007, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp: 899-922.
Guo, S., Liu, Y., Chen, R., Sun, X., Wang, X., “Improved SMOTE Algorithm to Deal With Imbalanced Activity Classes in Smart Homes”, Neural Processing Letters, 2019, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp.1503-1526.
Han, J., Kamber, M., Pei, J., “Data Mining:  Concepts and Techniques”, Third Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems, 2011.
Huynh, H., Sobek, E., El-Hajj, M., Atwal, S., “An Analysis of Rock Climbing Sport Regarding Performance, Sponsorship, and Health”, In 8th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference, IEEE, 2018, pp: 248-254.
Jazayeri, A. B., “Organizational performance evaluation”, First Edition, Ayezh Publisher, Tehran, Iran, 2014, In Farsi.
Kim, H. J., Hur, W. M., Moon, T. W.,  Jun, J. K., “Is all support equal? The moderating effects of supervisor, coworker, and organizational support on the link between emotional labor and job performance”, BRQ Business Research Quarterly, 2017, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp: 124-136.
Krishnan, B. C., Netemeyer, R. G., Boles, J. S., “Self-efficacy, competitiveness, and effort as antecedents of salesperson performance”, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2002, Vol. 22, No. 4, PP: 285-295.
Liao, S. H., Chen, J. L., Hsu, T. Y., “Ontology-based data Mining Approach Implemented for Sport Marketing”, Expert Systems with Applications, 2009, Vol. 36, No. 8, pp:11045-11056.
Liu, G., Sun, H., Bai, W., Li, H., Ren, Z., Zhang, Z., Yu, L., “A Learning-Based System for Predicting Sport Injuries”, In MATEC Web of Conferences, EDP Sciences, 2018, Vol. 189, pp: 1-6.
Lussier, B., Hartmann, N. N., “How psychological resourcefulness increases salesperson's sales performance and the satisfaction of their customers: Exploring the mediating role of customer-oriented behaviors”, Industrial Marketing Management, 2017, Vol. 62, pp: 160-170.
Miao, F., Wang, G., “The differential effects of functional vis-à-vis relational customer orientation on salesperson creativity”, Journal of Business Research, 2016, Vol. 69, N.12, PP: 6021–6030.
Nemin, A. T., Nemin, A. T., Qarabalag, R. M., “The relationship between seller and customer interaction with seller performance (case study: audio and video equipment)”, Business Management, 2019, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp: 21-40.
Park, J. E., Deitz, G. D., “The effect of working relationship quality on salesperson performance and job satisfaction: Adaptive selling behavior in Korean automobile sales representatives”, Journal of Business Research, 2006, Vol. 59, N. 2, pp: 204-213.
Pelechrinis, K., Evangelos, P., “Athlytics: Winning in Sports with Data”, In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, ACM, 2018, pp: 787-788.
Richard, E. P., Reid, A. D., “The Mediating Role of Sales Behaviors: An Alternative Perspective of sales Performance and Effectiveness”, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 1994, Vol. 14, pp: 43-56.
Rojas-Valverde, D., Gómez-Carmon, C. D., Gutiérrez-Vargas, R., Pino-Ortega, J., “From big data mining to technical sport reports: The case of inertial measurement units”, BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. 2019, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp: 1-3.
Rosendo-Ríos, V., Martín-Dávila, M., “Market orientation in the banking sector: Measuring the key role of salesperson performance”, Cuadernos de Economía, 2015, Vol. 38, No. 107, pp: 90-95.
Schumaker, R. P., Solieman, O. K., Chen, H., “Sports data mining” Vol. 26. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010.
Sheth, J. N., Sharma, A., “The Impact of the Product to Service Shift in Industrial Markets and the Evolution of the Sales Organization”. Industrial Marketing Management, 2008, Vol. 37, No. 3, PP: 260-269.
Singh, R. P., Singh, R., Mishra, P., “Does managing customer accounts receivable impact customer relationships, and sales performance? An empirical investigation”, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2021, Vol. 60, 102460.
Sokolova, M., Lapalme, G., “A Systematic Analysis of Performance Measures for Classification Tasks”, Information Processing and Management, 2009, Vol. 45, pp: 427-437.
Terho, H., Eggert, A., Haas, A., Ulaga, W., “How sales strategy translates into performance: The role of salesperson customer orientation and value-based selling” Industrial Marketing Management, 2015, Vol. 45, N. 1, PP: 12–21.
Torres, F. R., Ochoa, J. A. C., Trinidad, J. F. M., “Deterministic Oversampling Methods based on SMOTE”, Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 2019, Vol 36, No. 5, pp: 4945-55.
Verbeke, W., Dietz, B., Verwaal, E., “Drivers of sales performance: a contemporary meta-analysis. Have salespeople become knowledge brokers?”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2011, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp:407-428.
Yang, D., “Application of Data Mining Technology in the Subject Tactical Teaching of Badminton”, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2018, Vol. 13, No. 7.
Interdisciplinary Journal of Management Studies (Formerly known as Iranian Journal of Management Studies)
Volume 17, Issue 1
January 2024
Pages 169-183

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics