Adam Rapp

The Role of the Sales-Service Interface and Ambidexterity in the Evolving Organization: A Multilevel Research Agenda

Despite a long history of independent sales and service functions within organizations, customers are pressuring organizations to rethink their sales and service operations. Specifically, customers expect organizations to offer a “single face” of the firm rather than being forced to interact with multiple agents across both sales and service throughout their relationships. As firms attempt to meet these customer demands, they have countless options to integrate sales and service operations, but little is known about which strategies are most effective. This article attempts to shed new light into the challenges and potential benefits of sales-service integration, in an effort to spur research in this area and better inform this managerial challenge. Specifically, we formalize the concept of the sales-service interface, discuss how it relates to sales-service ambidexterity, and identify several opportunities for future research. Given the complexity of the sales-service interface, we contend that future researchers must view these issues through a multilevel lens and, as a result, we focus on identifying opportunities ideally suited for testing in a multilevel environment. The goal of this article is to provide a platform for researchers to tackle this challenging problem and generate new insights into how best to meet customer’s evolving demands.

The Importance of Product/Service Quality for Frontline Marketing Employee Outcomes: The Moderating Effect of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)

Drawing from a social identity perspective of the organizational identification theory, we propose a model in which product and service quality serve as antecedents to frontline employee identification with the organization, which, in turn, is proposed to be positively related to job satisfaction, commitment, and customer orientation. The model also proposes leader-member exchange (LMX), which refers to the different types of relationships that leaders (i.e., supervisors) develop with each of their subordinates (i.e., employees), as a boundary condition for the associated outcomes. The model was tested using data collected from 265 employees of a business-to-business service industry firm. The overall model was supported. All hypotheses were supported, except for the moderating effects of LMX on the relationship between organizational identification and job satisfaction.

Do sales and service compete? The impact of multiple psychological climates on frontline employee performance

This research examines how employees’ climate perceptions – or psychological climate – influence their performance of climate-related outcomes. We focus on two specific climates arguably most relevant to boundary-spanning organizations: service and sales climates. Building from the resource-allocation framework, the authors examine the way employees reconcile these multiple psychological climates. Polynomial regression and response surface modeling are used to test for the influence of these distinct climates on employee outcomes using a sample of 252 marketing employees and their 68 immediate supervisors. Specifically, the authors examine relationships between service and sales climates and the employee performance outcomes of customer satisfaction, helping behavior, effort, and sales performance. Results provide insight into the benefits and pitfalls of sales and service climates co-existing. Specifically we find that while sales effort is highest in climates that heavily favor sales, sales performance may exist in both sales-favored and service-favored climates (yet not in the presence of both). From a customer satisfaction perspective we find no significant impact of increasing sales climate in the presence of high service perceptions. These findings – both significant and non-significant – provide implications for future research in the realm of service-sales ambidexterity and interface as well as insight and direction for frontline managers.

Translating sales effort into service performance: it's an emotional ride

It has been broadly assumed by both researchers and managers that the more effort salespeople exert, the better their performance outcomes are likely to be. However, organizations are placing an increasing emphasis not just on objective sales outcomes, but on subjective, customer service outcomes as well. This research tests relationships between employee effort and relational performance. We develop and test the position that employee effort reaches a point of diminishing returns, after which relational performance decreases. Further, in an effort to bound our model, we test the moderating role played by employees emotional intelligence in this relationship. We test our study model in a lagged, multisource field study, matching survey data collected from 107 employees and 19 supervisors, relational performance metrics, and archived effort data collected for a period of 3 months pre–survey data collection. The results from our analysis indicate that the relationship between effort and relational performance is captured by an inverted U-shaped function that is significantly moderated by emotional intelligence. We find that the effort of employees with low EI reaches an identifiable point of diminishing returns; however, the more effort those with high EI exert, the better their relational performance outcomes tend to be.

Price Matching: To Match or Not to Match?

Regardless of the product category, market segment, geographic location, or target customer base, pricing and decisions about pricing tactics are among the most critical areas of a firm’s marketing strategy. Consumers have always been price conscious and focused on getting the lowest possible price. What we refer to today as “comparison shopping” is really only a modern term for a practice that is as old as commerce itself. Before the web, consumers purchased product guidebooks, read magazine reviews, scanned circulars, perused the newspaper, and visited many stores before making any big purchase. This practice is not new, but its form has changed. The changes are substantial and coincide with the advent of the newest widely available mobile technologies. We now comparison shop with smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers that make our searches for competing products and services more efficient and inclusive than was possible without these mobile technologies and their infrastructure that we now take for granted.

Can Service Climate Detract from Employee Performance? The Role of Experience in Optimizing Satisfaction and Performance Outcomes

In this research, we test the curvilinear relationships between service climate perceptions and two employee performance outcomes. Specifically, we propose that while service climate can be beneficial, high levels can actually be detrimental to customer satisfaction and sales performance. Additionally, we propose that a global assessment of employee experience that captures knowledge, skills, and abilities, or KSAs, moderates these curvilinear relationships by providing a means to balance outcome goals. We test our theory using data obtained from 312 employees in a service setting, which we pair with their managers’ assessments of their sales performance as well as satisfaction ratings from their customers. Our results reveal two things: (1) an inverted U-shaped relationship between service climate and sales performance and (2) the level of experience moderates the relationship. These findings suggest that more experienced employees are better able to adjust behaviors to achieve high levels of performance than less experienced employees. Based on these results, we offer theoretical implications and applications for managerial practice.

Sales Team Resources for Market-Driven Behaviors, Norms, and Performance: An Extended Abstract

A recent survey of 1200 sales executives indicated that in order to improve sales performance, leaders must champion salesperson activities that (1) improve customer experiences and (2) support continuous improvement (Accenture CSO Insights 2013). This contemporary focus represents a shift away from a formal mapping of sales approaches and toward an emphasis on sales teams which promote a learning- and customer-centric environment (Bell and Kozlowski 2002) to attune themselves with the market. In line with this, research has shown that learning effort (Sujan et al. 1994) and commitment to customer service quality (Peccei and Rosenthal 1997) are key to developing this more market-driven capability for salesperson performance.

Introduction to the special issue on the intersection of professional selling and service

As organizational operations continue to evolve in response to increasing customer demands, frontline research has begun to consider how traditionally separate organizational functions may be complementary to firm performance. Specifically, as sales and service activities become increasingly intertwined within the frontline role, this special issue explores how the sales and service functions interact within an organization. The articles contained in this special issue consider the interaction of sales and service with respect to customer, employee, and firm outcomes. After introducing evolving thought in the area, we provide an overview of five articles that make up this special issue. We conclude by offering additional areas of research.

Introduction: What Is Showrooming?

We have all seen it. A customer walks in, not looking casually or really browsing, but focused, with smartphone ready. Not seeking help on the floor, but moving directly toward a particular section in the store. He or she may respond to a salesperson’s attempt to engage—the friendly “Can I help you?” or “Can I show you something?” or “Can I help you find something today?”—with an assured, calm, even careless response, “I’m fine, thanks!” or “I’ve got it covered, thanks!” or “I’m good, thanks!”

Today’s Customers

The retail industry today is more dynamic than it has ever been. Fundamental shifts in consumer behavior over the past 15 years have led some industry experts to predict that retail will change more over the next 5 years than it has in the past century.1 In the wake of what many have referred to as the Great Recession, consumers have developed new attitudes that are having a fundamental influence on their purchase patterns and their purchasing behaviors.