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• Objectives/Research questionsThe salesperson role goes beyond the basic sales function, as they also need to build good relationship quality with professional customers to engender and maintain loyalty. This research aims to identify the levers of salespeople’s relational performance and reveal how those levers contribute to relationship quality. • MethodologyDrawing on a literature review, we provide a list of 21 elements of relational performance (ERPs) for salespeople. Using the tetraclass model (Llosa, 1997) with a sample of 202 artisan and shopkeeper customers, we then hierarchize the contribution of the 21 factors to the formation of relationship quality by classifying them into four categories: basic, key, plus, and secondary elements. • ResultsThe results show that customer-oriented behaviors are basic, customer culture elements are key, and elements linked to salespeople’s extra roles (such as acting as a friend and proactivity) are plus. • Managerial/societal implicationsThis research puts forward new findings on the the hierarchizing of HR actions (training, customer culture, and recruitment) with salespeople with a view to improving relationship quality with customers, depending on customer value and competition intensity. • OriginalityAlthough it is usually used to explain the construction of satisfaction in B2C services, in this research tetraclass is applied to the relationship quality between salespeople and their customers in the B2B domain, thus broadening its conceptual scope and external validity.