Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call (SBIS-F)

1. Abstract

The Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call (SBIS-F) is a psychometric instrument developed by Andrea L. Dixon, Rosann L. Spiro, and Maqbul Jamil (2001) to evaluate the coping mechanisms, behavioral adaptations, and motivational trajectories that sales professionals intend to execute following an unsuccessful sales interaction. Grounded in Bernard Weiner’s attribution theory, cognitive appraisal and coping models, and self-regulatory frameworks in occupational psychology, the instrument measures post-failure behavioral adaptation across five multidimensional domains: (1) Work Harder, (2) Work Smarter, (3) Seek Assistance, (4) Change Strategy, and (5) Avoid/Withdraw / Decrease Effort.

The SBIS-F comprises 15 items measured on a 6-point forced-choice Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 6 (“Strongly Agree”), deliberately constructed without a neutral midpoint to eliminate central tendency bias in reporting coping intentions. Psychometric evaluations using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrate excellent structural validity, with all five latent subdimensions meeting stringent internal consistency thresholds (α ≥ .80). Convergent and discriminant validity are supported through empirical linkages with causal attribution dimensions (locus of causality, stability, and controllability), intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and objective sales performance metrics. As a diagnostic and research tool, the SBIS-F offers researchers, sales executives, and industrial-organizational psychologists an empirically robust method for diagnosing failure-response strategies, predicting salesperson turnover, and designing targeted cognitive-behavioral interventions and sales training programs.

2. Keywords

Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale, SBIS-F, sales failure, attribution theory, post-failure adaptation, coping strategies, work harder, work smarter, sales performance, psychometrics, salesperson motivation, organizational psychology

3. Authors

The Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call was developed and validated by an esteemed team of marketing, sales strategy, and organizational behavior scholars:

• Andrea L. Dixon, Ph.D. — Frank M. and Floy Smith Holloway Endowed Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Center for Professional Selling at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University. Her research focuses on sales leadership, organizational frontline management, and behavioral adaptation in buyer-seller interactions.
• Rosann L. Spiro, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Spiro is an internationally recognized authority on personal selling, sales management, adaptive selling, and organizational strategy.
• Maqbul Jamil, Ph.D. — Former Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, and Rutgers Business School, specializing in empirical quantitative modeling, consumer psychology, and frontline performance analysis.

4. Purpose

In competitive personal selling environments, failure is an inescapable reality. Frontline sales representatives routinely encounter prospect rejection, lost deals, customer disinterest, and failed negotiation pitches. However, the operational success and career trajectory of sales professionals are not dictated solely by the occurrence of failure, but rather by the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional adjustments they deploy immediately following unsuccessful encounters. The primary purpose of the Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call (SBIS-F) is to systematically assess the specific behavioral intentions a sales agent plans to enact when confronting a similar future sales call after experiencing a failure.

Historically, the sales management literature frequently treated post-failure response as a simplistic binary construct: persevering versus quitting, or increasing overall effort versus experiencing motivational burnout. Drawing from cognitive motivation models and Harish Sujan’s pioneering work on procedural versus effort-based selling orientations, Dixon, Spiro, and Jamil recognized that sales representatives respond to failure through nuanced, multidimensional operational pathways. An unsuccessful interaction may prompt a professional to deploy brute-force energy (working harder), re-engineer tactical planning and time allocation (working smarter), utilize organizational and interpersonal safety nets (seeking assistance), fundamentally revamp their selling paradigm (changing strategy), or conversely, psychologically and operationally disengage from the account (avoidance and withdrawal).

The SBIS-F bridges a critical measurement gap in occupational psychology and sales enablement. By measuring what sales representatives intend to do in subsequent encounters, the scale provides predictive insight into downstream behavior. In behavioral science, as posited by the Theory of Planned Behavior, behavioral intention functions as the most proximal cognitive antecedent to actual behavioral execution. Clinically and organizationally, the SBIS-F enables sales leaders, human resource professionals, and executive coaches to diagnose maladaptive failure attribution patterns, mitigate costly sales force turnover, prevent learned helplessness, and tailor coaching interventions to cultivate adaptive resilience.

5. Psychological Construct

The SBIS-F captures the cognitive-motivational architecture of post-failure coping behavior across five distinct, theoretical subdimensions. Each dimension reflects a discrete behavioral trajectory emerging from the salesperson’s internal cognitive appraisal of failure:

1. Work Harder (Increased Effort)

The Work Harder dimension operationalizes an individual’s commitment to intensify quantitative energetic expenditure in future iterations of the sales task. It reflects direct behavioral perseverance and heightened physical and temporal input. For example, after losing an enterprise software account, a representative scoring high on this dimension intends to make more follow-up calls, extend daily working hours, and push their personal output limits. This dimension corresponds to traditional achievement motivation frameworks, indicating an underlying belief that failure stemmed from an remediable deficit in effort.

2. Work Smarter (Planning and Organization)

The Work Smarter construct measures intentions directed toward refining procedural efficiency, temporal management, and strategic pre-call preparation. Distinct from brute-force exertion, working smarter denotes qualitative self-regulation. A representative scoring high on this subscale intends to structure their account briefings more rigorously, conduct thorough prospect research, construct detailed call agendas, and optimize time management. It indicates metacognitive awareness and strategic self-monitoring.

3. Seek Assistance (Social & Structural Support Coping)

The Seek Assistance subdimension assesses the salesperson’s intention to leverage external, organizational, and interpersonal resources to remediate performance deficits. Rather than attempting to solve the complex selling dilemma in cognitive isolation, the professional intends to consult frontline sales managers, collaborate with peers, or request technical support from product specialists. This construct captures proactive, instrumental help-seeking behavior, reflecting psychological safety and collaborative problem-solving rather than operational weakness.

4. Change Strategy (Adaptive Tactical Modification)

The Change Strategy dimension captures the planned implementation of alternative sales methodologies, pitch structures, value propositions, or negotiation techniques. Representatives scoring high on this subscale recognize that persisting with existing sales scripts or approaches is counterproductive. Instead, they intend to alter their presentation rhetoric, shift the primary value proposition, or pivot from product-centric selling to consultative, customer-centric value co-creation.

5. Avoid/Withdraw / Decrease Effort (Disengagement & Burnout)

The Avoid/Withdraw / Decrease Effort dimension represents a maladaptive, disengagement-oriented coping response. It measures intentions to reduce emotional investment, curb time allocated to the prospect, and disengage psychological energy from the client or territory. Rooted in learned helplessness, ego-defensive self-handicapping, and burnout, elevated scores on this construct denote resignation, risk of account abandonment, and potential voluntary or involuntary turnover.

6. Theoretical Framework

The SBIS-F is structurally grounded in the convergence of three foundational psychological theories: Bernard Weiner’s Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion, Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, and Charles Carver and Michael Scheier’s Cybernetic Control Theory of Self-Regulation.

Weiner’s Attribution Theory

Attribution theory posits that when individuals encounter unexpected or negative outcomes (such as failing to close a critical sales deal), they engage in spontaneous cognitive search processes to identify the causal agent behind the event. Weiner classified these causal attributions along three primary dimensions: Locus of Causality (internal vs. external), Stability (stable/permanent vs. unstable/temporary), and Controllability (controllable vs. uncontrollable).

Dixon, Spiro, and Jamil (2001) linked these cognitive attributions directly to the behavioral intentions measured by the SBIS-F:

• Internal, Unstable, Controllable Attributions (e.g., Effort Deficit): Attributing a lost sale to insufficient effort leads to guilt and energizes the intention to Work Harder.
• Internal, Unstable, Controllable Attributions (e.g., Strategy Deficit): Attributing failure to flawed tactics stimulates cognitive restructuring, leading to intentions to Work Smarter and Change Strategy.
• External, Controllable Attributions (e.g., Task Complexity, Resource Deficits): Leads to instrumental coping, activating the intention to Seek Assistance from managers and coworkers.
• Internal, Stable, Uncontrollable Attributions (e.g., Lack of Innate Ability) or External, Uncontrollable Attributions: Stimulates shame, fatalism, and learned helplessness, which directly triggers Avoidance, Withdrawal, and Effort Reduction.

Transactional Model of Coping

According to Lazarus and Folkman’s model, coping responses are classified as either problem-focused (directed at managing or altering the problem causing distress) or emotion-focused (directed at regulating the emotional distress associated with the situation). The SBIS-F captures this dichotomy with high precision: Work Harder, Work Smarter, Change Strategy, and Seek Assistance represent instrumental, problem-focused coping mechanisms designed to alter the external operational reality, whereas Avoid/Withdraw represents an emotion-focused, ego-protective disengagement mechanism.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the SBIS-F was rigorously established through extensive pre-testing, structural equation modeling (SEM), and multi-sample validation across diverse industrial business-to-business (B2B) sales contexts.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was confirmed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), where all 15 items loaded strongly and significantly onto their designated latent factors (standardized factor loadings exceeding .70, p < .001). Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for each of the five subdimensions exceeded the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), demonstrating that the variance explained by the latent constructs is substantially greater than variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity across the five behavioral intention constructs was verified through pairwise chi-square difference testing between unconstrained models and nested models where inter-factor correlations were fixed to unity. In every instance, the unconstrained model produced a statistically superior fit (Δχ² significant at p < .001). Furthermore, the squared correlations between any pair of constructs were consistently lower than the individual AVE values for each construct, confirming that each behavioral intention domain measures an empirically distinct behavioral trajectory.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological validity was verified by evaluating the relationship between salesperson causal attributions, self-efficacy, and the resulting behavioral intentions. Empirical testing demonstrated that:

• Attributions of failure to poor strategy were positively and significantly related to intentions to Change Strategy (β = .46, p < .01) and Work Smarter (β = .39, p < .01).
• Attributions to low effort positively predicted intentions to Work Harder (β = .52, p < .001).
• Attributions to innate lack of ability or customer bias positively predicted Avoidance/Withdrawal intentions (β = .41, p < .01).
• Longitudinal follow-ups demonstrated that representatives with higher scores on adaptive dimensions (Work Harder, Work Smarter, Change Strategy) achieved significantly higher annual sales quota attainment compared to peers with high Avoidance scores.

8. Reliability

The SBIS-F demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across all five subdimensions. In the seminal validation studies conducted by Dixon, Spiro, and Jamil (2001), the internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha, α) across all subdimensions exceeded the rigorous psychometric standard of .80:

• Work Harder: α = .86 (3 items)
• Work Smarter: α = .84 (3 items)
• Seek Assistance: α = .88 (3 items)
• Change Strategy: α = .82 (3 items)
• Avoid/Withdraw / Decrease Effort: α = .81 (3 items)

Composite reliability (CR) metrics computed via structural equation modeling corroborated these findings, yielding values ranging between .82 and .89. Inter-item correlations within each 3-item subscale demonstrated strong convergence (ranging from .58 to .76), while corrected item-total correlations remained consistently above the .50 cutoff criterion. Test-retest reliability across a four-week stability interval among a subsample of B2B frontline account managers demonstrated temporal stability coefficients ranging from r = .74 to .83, confirming that the scale captures stable post-failure behavioral tendencies while retaining sensitivity to contextual sales interventions.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the SBIS-F was analyzed utilizing a dual-stage exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic methodology.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During preliminary scale development, the initial pool of candidate items underwent exploratory factor analysis using Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) with Promax oblique rotation to account for theoretical correlations among active behavioral adaptations. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy exceeded .85, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was statistically significant (χ² = 1845.32, df = 105, p < .001), demonstrating excellent sample suitability for factor extraction. The analysis yielded a clean five-factor solution based on the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and scree plot examination, explaining over 68.5% of the total variance.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) in a distinct validation sample assessed whether the hypothesized 5-factor structure provided a superior fit over rival alternative models (e.g., a single-factor general response model, a two-factor active vs. passive model, and a three-factor model combining effort and strategy). The five-factor oblique measurement model exhibited exceptional goodness-of-fit indices:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): 1.68 (Values < 3.0 indicate acceptable model fit)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 (Values > .95 indicate superior fit)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .95 (Values > .90 indicate robust fit)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 (90% CI: [.036, .060]; values < .06 indicate close fit)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .042 (Values < .08 indicate adequate fit)

All standardized factor loadings loaded cleanly and significantly onto their designated constructs without cross-loadings > .20, verifying that the 15-item, five-factor structure is stable and invariant across diverse sales environments.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Scale Title: Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call (SBIS-F)
• Authors: Andrea L. Dixon, Rosann L. Spiro, and Maqbul Jamil (2001)
• Original Publication: Journal of Marketing, Vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 64–78
• Administration Type: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire
• Completion Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Number of Items: 15 items
• Dimensional Structure: 5 subscales with 3 items each:
  • Work Harder (Items 1–3)
  • Work Smarter (Items 4–6)
  • Seek Assistance (Items 7–9)
  • Change Strategy (Items 10–12)
  • Avoid/Withdraw / Decrease Effort (Items 13–15)
• Response Scale: 6-point forced-choice Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 6 = Strongly Agree)
• Scoring Instructions: Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the arithmetic mean or raw sum of the three items comprising each respective subdimension. No reverse scoring is applied to individual items, as Avoid/Withdraw constitutes its own independent subscale rather than the negative pole of the active coping dimensions. Higher scores on subscales 1–4 denote adaptive, problem-focused coping intentions; higher scores on subscale 5 denote withdrawal, disengagement, and burnout vulnerability.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Salesperson Behavioral Intention Scale – Unsuccessful Sales Call was developed and published in 2001. The instrument is published in the academic literature within the Journal of Marketing, copyrighted by the American Marketing Association (AMA).

For non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and scholarly research inquiries, the scale items may be utilized under standard fair-use scholarly conventions, provided proper academic citation and attribution are given to Dixon, Spiro, and Jamil (2001). Commercial use, integration into proprietary corporate assessment platforms, or commercial consulting applications require prior formal permission and licensing clearance through the American Marketing Association or the Copyright Clearance Center.

12. References

• Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality–social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92(1), 111–135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.92.1.111
• Dixon, A. L., Spiro, R. L., & Jamil, M. (2001). Successful and unsuccessful sales calls: Measuring salesperson attributions and behavioral intentions. Journal of Marketing, 65(3), 64–78. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.65.3.64.18330
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Spiro, R. L., & Weitz, B. A. (1990). Adaptive selling: Conceptualization, measurement, and nomological validity. Journal of Marketing Research, 27(1), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379002700106
• Sujan, H. (1986). Smarter versus harder: An exploratory attributional analysis of salespeople’s motivation. Journal of Marketing Research, 23(1), 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378602300105
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548
• Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion. Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4948-1

13. Items of the Scale