The power of adaptation

30th September 2025 |   Professor Nick Lee and Dr Roland Kassemeier

Although adaptive selling can transform sales performance, it’s not a silver bullet.

We all know that the best salespeople don’t always follow the script. While reps might start out reciting memorized pitches, as they develop they learn to read the room, adjust their approach, and craft solutions that resonate with each unique customer. This distinction captures the essence of adaptive selling, a concept with a long history in academic sales research, that has been consistently shown to help separate great salespeople from the merely good ones.

The scientific foundation

Adaptive selling emerged as a formal construct through the pioneering work of Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan (1986), who defined it as “the altering of sales behaviours during a customer interaction or across customer interactions based on perceived information about the nature of the selling situation”. This seemingly simple and common-sense definition masks a sophisticated cognitive process whereby highly adaptive salespeople continuously assess situational cues, customer characteristics, and contextual factors to optimise their approach.

The theoretical foundation of adaptive selling rests on the premise that effective selling requires matching sales behaviours to specific situational demands rather than applying uniform approaches across all customer interactions. Spiro and Weitz (1990) later operationalised this concept through the ADAPTS scale, establishing adaptive selling as a measurable behavioural construct that could be studied empirically.