Communication Foci in Selling–Measurement Model Inventory

Abstract

The Communication Foci in Selling—Measurement Model Inventory (Klarmann & Wouters, 2023) is an advanced psychometric assessment instrument developed to operationalize and evaluate the multifaceted nature of interpersonal communication within business-to-business (B2B) sales encounters. Stemming from empirical imperatives in modern sales management that call for granular, behavior-specific measurement of rational influence strategies and customer-salesperson interactions, the inventory systematically delineates four distinct communication foci: value communication, benefit communication, feature communication, and discount communication. Structurally, the instrument employs a hierarchical, second-order psychometric architecture in which each of the four overarching communication foci is manifested across four temporal and functional interactional stages: developing a proposal, presenting the offering to the prospective customer, discussing the offering with the prospective customer, and closing the sales encounter.

The comprehensive inventory comprises 36 items in total, structured as 9 operational indicators for each of the four primary communication dimensions across the sales process stages. Administered through a standardized inventory/questionnaire format in both English and German, the scale was empirically validated using a professional sample of active B2B sales professionals. Psychometric evaluation via structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing the R package lavaan demonstrated outstanding psychometric properties. Composite reliability coefficients are exceptionally high across all four second-order constructs: Value Communication ($rho_c = .98$), Benefit Communication ($rho_c = .97$), Feature Communication ($rho_c = .99$), and Discount Communication ($rho_c = .94$). The instrument exhibits robust convergent and discriminant validity, offering scholars and organizational practitioners an empirical apparatus for diagnosing communicative efficacy, designing targeted sales enablement programs, and exploring the psychological and financial determinants of relational exchange performance.

Keywords

Benefit Communication, Business-To-Business Selling, Composite Reliability, Discount Communication, Feature Communication, Rational Influence Tactics, Salesperson-Customer Interaction, Value Communication, Structural Equation Modeling, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Personal Selling, Sales Management

Authors

The Communication Foci in Selling—Measurement Model Inventory was formulated, tested, and published by scholars at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany:

• Martin Klarmann, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing at the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing (IISM), Marketing & Sales Research Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany. His research centers on sales management, B2B marketing, customer orientation, and empirical quantitative methodology.
• Marc Wouters, Ph.D. (Corresponding Author): Professor of Management Accounting at the Institute of Management (IBU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), PO Box 6980, 76049 Karlsruhe, Germany. Email: [email protected]. His scholarly focus includes management control, operations management interfaces, cost accounting, and customer value quantification in commercial technologies.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Communication Foci in Selling—Measurement Model Inventory is to provide a reliable, psychometrically rigorous, and diagnostic assessment instrument designed to capture the exact substantive informational emphasis deployed by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople during interpersonal commercial interactions. For decades, academic scholarship in personal selling and sales management relied on broad, macro-level constructs such as customer-oriented selling versus selling-oriented behavior (SOCO), adaptive selling, or generalized influence tactics. While these broad constructs illuminated behavioral tendencies, they largely obscured the precise informational content exchanged between buyers and sellers across discrete communicative milestones.

In contemporary industrial markets characterized by high technological complexity, elongated buying cycles, and multidisciplinary buying centers, the informational content conveyed by a vendor’s representative is the pivotal determinant of exchange outcomes. Scholars have increasingly emphasized that salespeople do not merely deliver uniform sales pitches; rather, they selectively emphasize distinct economic, technical, or financial facets of an offering. The inventory was specifically engineered to address calls in the sales management literature (e.g., Alavi et al., 2019; Hall & Lee, 2019) for more granular, operationally grounded measures that unbundle persuasive discourse into distinct communication strategies.

From an applied organizational perspective, this tool fulfills several vital functions:

• Salesforce Behavioral Auditing: It provides sales executives with an empirical instrument to assess whether their commercial teams are executing intended go-to-market strategies, such as shifting from technical “feature-dumping” or concessionary price discounting toward quantified value-based selling.
• Training Diagnostics and Needs Assessment: It identifies individual-level and unit-level deficits across stages of the sales process. For example, a salesperson may successfully communicate technical benefits during initial presentations but retreat to discount communication during the closing encounter.
• Research and Predictive Modeling: It equips empirical researchers with an operational vehicle to investigate how organizational drivers (e.g., incentive systems, product complexity, value quantification tools) govern the deployment of distinct communication foci, and how these foci causally affect customer-perceived value, margin preservation, relationship commitment, and objective closing rates.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct underlying the inventory is conceptualized as Communication Foci in Selling. A communication focus represents the substantive, intentional thematic orientation that an economic actor adopts when conveying information to an interaction partner to achieve cognitive, affective, or behavioral compliance. Rather than viewing sales discourse as a monolithic influence attempt, this framework treats communication as multidimensional and stage-contingent. The construct is partitioned into four second-order communication foci, each systematically manifested across four first-order processual subfactors:

Second-Order Dimensions (Communication Foci)

1. Value Communication: This dimension reflects communicative acts centered on the quantified, net economic, and operational impact of the supplier’s offering on the customer’s business model. It transcends technical utility by articulating explicit financial returns, total cost of ownership (TCO) reductions, productivity gains, or profit expansions. For instance, communicating value involves demonstrating how an industrial machine saves €250,000 annually through reduced energy consumption and lower defect rates.
2. Benefit Communication: This dimension encompasses statements focused on the functional advantages, qualitative solutions, and operational improvements offered to the client, without necessarily translating these advantages into explicit monetary or financial metrics. It emphasizes how the product or service solves operational bottlenecks, enhances operational safety, or simplifies user workflows.
3. Feature Communication: This dimension captures communication focused strictly on the technical, structural, physical, or engineering attributes of the product or service. Examples include detailing raw material compositions, microprocessor clock speeds, software architecture configurations, or physical specifications. While informative, heavy reliance on feature communication places the cognitive burden on the customer to deduce practical business implications.
4. Discount Communication: This focus involves commercial rhetoric that centers on concessions, price reductions, rebates, payment terms, and structural bargaining maneuvers. It represents an economic appeal based on lowering acquisition costs rather than elevating product worth or strategic value.

First-Order Dimensions (Interactional Stages)

Each of the four communication foci is operationalized across four sequential yet iterative stages of the interpersonal sales interaction:

• Developing a Proposal: The preparatory and structuring stage wherein the salesperson translates requirements into written bids, commercial terms, and formal technical documents.
• Presenting the Offering: The formal exposition phase where the solution is introduced to key decision-makers, setting the baseline frame of the engagement.
• Discussing the Offering: The interactive, dialogic phase characterized by objection handling, reciprocal inquiry, technical clarification, and co-creation of requirements.
• Closing the Sales Encounter: The final decisive phase where commitment is secured, contracts are finalized, and final agreements regarding terms and delivery are executed.

Theoretical Framework

The Communication Foci in Selling—Measurement Model Inventory is anchored in the convergence of several foundational paradigms from cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and communication theory:

Dual-Process Theory of Persuasion

The scale draws heavily on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) formulated by Petty and Cacioppo, as well as the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) developed by Chaiken. In high-stakes B2B purchasing, organizational buyers engage in high levels of issue-relevant elaboration (systematic processing). Under the central route of persuasion, buyers evaluate the logical cogency, verifiable evidence, and quantitative validity of arguments. Value communication and benefit communication serve as potent central-route arguments because they directly reduce the cognitive effort required by the buyer to assess financial feasibility and return on investment. Conversely, feature communication provides raw informational input that may induce cognitive overload if not contextualized. Discount communication often activates peripheral or heuristic decision-making rules (e.g., “a 15% price cut represents an acceptable bargain”), which can obscure the underlying structural merits of the offering.

Rational Influence Tactics and Social Exchange Theory

The inventory is embedded within the literature on rational influence tactics in organizations (Kipnis et al., 1980; Yukl & Falbe, 1990). Within personal selling, rational persuasion represents the deployment of logical arguments and factual evidence to demonstrate that a proposal fulfills commercial objectives. The communication foci framework refines rational persuasion by demonstrating that rationality is heterogeneous: an argument can be rational at a purely technical level (features), a functional level (benefits), an enterprise economic level (value), or a transactional expenditure level (discounts). According to Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964; Homans, 1958), interpersonal interactions persist and thrive when the perceived exchange value outweighs the costs. By measuring how salespeople communicate along these four vectors, the inventory operationalizes how exchange partners negotiate and construct shared perceptions of relational fairness, mutual dependence, and value equity.

Validity

The psychometric evaluation of the Communication Foci in Selling—Measurement Model Inventory was conducted using rigorous structural equation modeling procedures designed to substantiate construct, convergent, and discriminant validity across complex occupational populations:

Construct and Structural Validity

To establish structural validity, Klarmann and Wouters (2023) tested and compared three competing structural models using nested $chi^2$ difference tests. The theoretical architecture positing four distinct, second-order communication constructs—each manifested through the four first-order communication stages (proposal development, presentation, discussion, and closing)—yielded superior fit compared to single-factor or unidimensional specifications. This hierarchical operationalization confirmed that while communication varies dynamically across interaction stages, salespeople exhibit stable, construct-specific focal tendencies across the lifecycle of an encounter.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is confirmed when indicators of a specific construct share a high proportion of common variance. The measurement model demonstrated exceptional convergent validity across all dimensions, as evidenced by the Average Variance Extracted (AVE), calculated as:

$$text{AVE} = frac{sum_{i=1}^k lambda_i^2}{sum_{i=1}^k lambda_i^2 + sum_{i=1}^k text{Var}(epsilon_i)}$$

All four constructs comfortably exceeded the standard psychometric threshold of $text{AVE} > .50$:

• Value Communication: $text{AVE} = .93$
• Feature Communication: $text{AVE} = .94$
• Benefit Communication: $text{AVE} = .91$
• Discount Communication: $text{AVE} = .81$

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established via the Fornell–Larcker criterion, which dictates that the square root of the AVE for each construct must exceed the inter-construct correlations ($sqrt{text{AVE}_j} > r_{jk}$ for all $k neq j$). The analysis indicated that each focal construct shares substantially more variance with its own stage indicators than with any other communication focus, confirming that practitioners treat value, benefit, feature, and discount arguments as distinct tactical behaviors.

Reliability

The reliability of the inventory was comprehensively documented across multiple hierarchical levels, including individual indicator reliabilities, first-order interaction stage reliabilities, and composite reliabilities ($rho_c$) for the second-order constructs:

Composite Reliability

Composite reliability measures internal consistency based on model parameter estimates. The inventory exhibited near-perfect reliability across all four constructs:

• Feature Communication: $rho_c = .99$
• Value Communication: $rho_c = .98$
• Benefit Communication: $rho_c = .97$
• Discount Communication: $rho_c = .94$

First-Order Factor Reliabilities (Stage Dimensions)

Internal consistency metrics for the first-order factors across specific selling stages revealed robust stability across distinct communicative phases:

• Value Communication Stages: Ranged from $.89$ (proposal development stage) to $.96$ (presentation stage).
• Feature Communication Stages: Ranged from $.88$ (closing encounter stage) to $.997$ (presentation stage).
• Benefit Communication Stages: Ranged from $.84$ (discussion stage) to $.98$ (closing stage).
• Discount Communication Stages: Ranged from $.68$ (proposal development stage) to $.90$ (closing stage).

Individual Item Reliabilities

Individual item squared standardized factor loadings ($lambda^2$) reflect the proportion of variance explained by the underlying latent factor:

• Value Communication Items: Loadings ranged from $.80$ to $.95$.
• Benefit Communication Items: Loadings ranged from $.68$ to $.84$.
• Feature Communication Items: Loadings ranged from $.55$ to $.82$.
• Discount Communication Items: Loadings ranged from $.31$ to $.96$, reflecting higher variability during preliminary proposal phases compared to closing phases.

Factor Analysis

To establish the empirical viability of the proposed multidimensional measurement framework, the authors conducted extensive confirmatory factor analyses using the structural equation modeling package lavaan (Rosseel, 2012) within the R statistical computing environment. The estimation evaluated four independent second-order measurement models corresponding to each communication focus.

Goodness-of-Fit Indices

Model fit was evaluated using standard indices: the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), the Tucker-Lewis Index / Non-Normed Fit Index (TLI/NNFI), the Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), and the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA). Results across all four constructs indicated strong structural alignment:

• Value Communication Model:
  • $text{CFI} = .97$
  • $text{TLI/NNFI} = .95$
  • $text{SRMR} = .02$
  • $text{RMSEA} = .13$
  • $text{AVE} = .93$
• Feature Communication Model:
  • $text{CFI} = .97$
  • $text{TLI/NNFI} = .95$
  • $text{SRMR} = .03$
  • $text{RMSEA} = .11$
  • $text{AVE} = .94$
• Benefit Communication Model:
  • $text{CFI} = .92$
  • $text{TLI/NNFI} = .92$
  • $text{SRMR} = .04$
  • $text{RMSEA} = .10$
  • $text{AVE} = .91$
• Discount Communication Model:
  • $text{CFI} = .92$
  • $text{TLI/NNFI} = .92$
  • $text{SRMR} = .04$
  • $text{RMSEA} = .12$
  • $text{AVE} = .81$

While the CFI, TLI, and SRMR indices demonstrated outstanding fit across all specifications, the elevated RMSEA values (ranging between $.10$ and $.13$) reflect the known sensitivity of RMSEA to degrees of freedom in highly integrated second-order models with tightly correlated stage subdimensions. The overarching fit statistics, coupled with high factor loadings, support the hierarchical operationalization.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Original psychometric inventory / multi-item rating scale
• Format: Inventory/Questionnaire (administered electronically)
• Target Population: Adult commercial professionals, specifically Business-to-Business (B2B) salespeople and sales leaders (tested on German B2B sales professionals)
• Language Versions: English, German
• Total Number of Items: 36 items
  • Value Communication: 9 items
  • Benefit Communication: 9 items
  • Feature Communication: 9 items
  • Discount Communication: 9 items
• Factor Architecture:
  • Second-Order Latent Factors (4 Foci): Value Communication, Benefit Communication, Feature Communication, Discount Communication
  • First-Order Latent Subfactors (4 Stages):
    • Stage 1: Developing a proposal
    • Stage 2: Presenting the offering to the prospective customer
    • Stage 3: Discussing the offering with the prospective customer
    • Stage 4: Closing the sales encounter
• Response Scale: Standardized self-report inventory format (Inventory/Questionnaire) reflecting the extent to which the salesperson engages in specific communicative behaviors across interaction stages.
• Scoring and Aggregation Protocol:
  • Responses within each functional stage (first-order subfactors) are computed first via indicator averaging.
  • Stage-specific scores are then aggregated to yield a single, overarching composite index for each of the four communication foci: Value, Benefit, Feature, and Discount.
  • Scores can be analyzed profile-analytically (e.g., assessing the balance between Value and Discount communication) or examined dynamically across process stages.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Year: 2023
• Copyright & Ownership: Copyright © 2023 by the authors (Martin Klarmann and Marc Wouters) and the publisher (Taylor & Francis / Informa UK Limited, trading as Routledge).
• Commercial Status: Non-commercial for academic and educational research.
• Fee: Free of charge for scholarly and academic investigations.
• Permissions & Access: Specific item content and authorization for empirical use must be obtained directly from the corresponding author, Prof. Dr. Marc Wouters ([email protected]), or accessed through the published journal article in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management.

References

• Alavi, S., Habel, J., & Linsenmayer, M. (2019). What drives customer orientation in business-to-business sales? A meta-analysis. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 39(4), 364–387. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2019.1627998
• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hall, Z. R., & Lee, N. (2019). Editorial: Toward a more nuanced understanding of personal selling and sales management. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 39(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2019.1578768
• Homans, G. C. (1958). Social behavior as exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63(6), 597–606. https://doi.org/10.1086/222355
• Kipnis, D., Schmidt, S. M., & Wilkinson, I. (1980). Intraorganizational influence tactics: Explorations in getting one’s way. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65(4), 440–452. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.65.4.440
• Klarmann, M., & Wouters, M. (2023). Benefits, discounts, features, and value as communication foci in selling: Exploring concepts, drivers, and outcomes. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 43(1), 46–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2022.2082451
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Rosseel, Y. (2012). lavaan: An R package for structural equation modeling. Journal of Statistical Software, 48(2), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v048.i02
• Yukl, G., & Falbe, C. M. (1990). Influence tactics and exchange outcomes in upward, downward, and lateral influence attempts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(2), 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.75.2.132

Items of the Scale