Examining hotel salespeople's new membership programme sales performance

Promoting new membership programmes can be a rewarding, yet challenging task for hotels. However, high-performance sales teams can improve consumer perceptions of new membership programmes in the market and allow hotels to remain competitive. Few studies have explored how hotel sales personnel approach the task of selling new membership programmes, and studies examining the moderating influence of market orientation are also rare. The current study contributes to the hospitality sales management literature by using the goal orientation theory to examine the new membership programmes sales performance of 168 salespeople. ‘Market orientation’ was included as a variable that could moderate salespeople’s performance. The results show that learning goal orientation and performance-prove goal orientation positively influence salespeople’s performance, but performance-avoid goal orientation negatively influences sales performance. Furthermore, hotels’ levels of market orientation (high or low) can moderate the relationship between goal orientation and sales performance.