The sales recovery audit: Learning to walk the talk

• This article develops a 15-item externally validated sales recovery audit for use in assessing sales recovery practices.
• Sales managers indicate significant gaps between the perceived importance and actual practice of sales recovery efforts.
• These gaps were found to be true for all items across all sales recovery audit dimensions.
• The largest gap between practice and importance was attributed to the feedback provision of the sales recovery audit.
• This study supports the integration of sales recovery strategies and processes into sales training.

Little research attention has been devoted to the impact of salesperson failure and recovery management on customer relationship development. This paper develops a theoretically anchored and externally validated sales recovery audit for the purpose of assessing sales organization performance in these matters. Results based on a survey of 177 sales managers indicate that practice of sales recovery efforts lags behind their perceived importance as they relate to organizational success. The sales recovery audit presented here can be a useful tool to continuously evaluate and enhance sales recovery efforts for the purpose of building a stronger relationship selling organization.