Douglas E. Hughes

Motivating Salespeople to Sell New Products: The Relative Influence of Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Self-Efficacy

This research explores the relative influence of salespeoples attitudes toward selling a new product, perceptions of subjective norms, and self-efficacy on the development of selling intentions and, ultimately, the success of a new product launch. The longitudinal study employs a nonlinear growth curve model that leverages survey data from industrial salespeople and objective performance records of their daily sales during the first several months in the market of two new products: a new-to-market product and a line extension. By examining salesperson-level variance on new product performance, the authors suggest that managers should focus on increasing salesperson self-efficacy and positive attitudes toward selling the product to build selling intentions and quickly grow new product performance. They also suggest that sales managers should resist the temptation to rely on normative pressure during a new product introduction. Not only are subjective norms less effective in building selling intentions, but they also diminish the positive impact of attitudes and self-efficacy on salesperson intentions and constrain the positive relationships between intentions and performance and self-efficacy and performance.

Managing Sales Force Product Perceptions and Control Systems in the Success of New Product Introductions

Given the importance of new products, firms may be prone to overmanage sales personnel by using behavior-based control systems that dictate the performance of particular activities related to the introduction. Such controls may be especially tempting given the findings that favorable salesperson product perceptions actually yield less effort on the new product, and behavior-based controls can offset this tendency. However, using longitudinal data from a sample of 226 salespeople, along with external ratings from customers and archival measures of effort and sales performance, the authors demonstrate that such a strategy is shortsighted. Behavior-based controls constrain a salespersons ability to appropriately allocate effort across his or her customer base, negatively affecting customer product perceptions and, ultimately, new product sales. In contrast, outcome-based control systems enable salespeople to work smarter, and their corresponding effort on behalf of the new product has a more positive effect on customer product perceptions and new product sales.

Social Networks Within Sales Organizations: Their Development and Importance for Salesperson Performance

Although the study of salesperson performance traditionally has focused on salespeoples activities and relationships with customers, scholars recently have proposed that salespeoples intraorganizational relationships and activities also play a vital role in driving sales performance. Using data from 286 salespeople in a unique social network analysis, the authors explore the effects of salespeoples intraorganizational relationships on objective salesperson performance as well as the role of political skill in developing intraorganizational relationships. The results indicate that two types of social network characteristics (i.e., relational centrality and positional centrality) contribute substantially to salesperson performance. Moreover, salespeoples political skill is shown to be an antecedent to relational centrality but, surprisingly, not positional centrality. This finding demonstrates that researchers should not assume that all centralities represent similar underlying network characteristics. In light of these results, the authors discuss several implications for both managers and researchers as well as directions for further research.

The Marketing–Sales Interface at the Interface: Creating Market-Based Capabilities through Organizational Synergy

The firm’s quest to create customer value is dependent on the synergistic coordination of many parts of the organization, wherein internal resources and capabilities are effectively harnessed to create a competitive advantage. The often suboptimal relationship between marketing and sales acts as an inhibitor to success in this regard and has been the subject of much attention in both the academic literature and popular press. The authors offer new insights into this issue by examining how the marketing–sales interface affects, and is affected by, other functional areas in the development of key organizational capabilities. They introduce a holistic framework that identifies key levers that must be integrated through cross-functional coordination and cooperation to achieve superior market-based capabilities that in turn enable the firm to create lasting customer value. Propositions linking the levers to market-based capabilities are offered to shape new research opportunities in the domain of the marketing and sales interface.

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.

JPSSM since the beginning: intellectual cornerstones, knowledge structure, and thematic developments

Bibliometric analyses are applied to 35,975 citations from 721 articles published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, spanning the journal’s first 35 years of existence (1980–2015). For each of three time periods (1980s, 1990s, and 2000s), the sales literature’s most influential article publications are objectively identified. Multidimensional scaling is then used to identify key intellectual themes across time. Based on the citation data, historical developments in the literature regarding (1) relationship marketing, (2) sales force technology, (3) sales force control systems, and (4) salesperson role stress are traced and briefly explored in some article-level depth. Co-citation trends and recently influential papers are used to identify opportunities for future research. Altogether, this paper presents a first-of-its-kind view of sales literature’s intellectual cornerstones, knowledge structure, and thematic developments over 35 years.

On the nature of international sales and sales management research: a social network–analytic perspective

This research uses a combination of text mining, co-word analysis, and social network analysis (SNA) to review 132 international sales and sales management (ISSM) articles published between 1980 and 2017. The study provides a unique view of the past and future of ISSM research and provides three principal contributions. First, from a social network–analytic perspective, it offers a unique examination of the ways ISSM research topics are interconnected, as reflected by keyword network structure. Second, by conducting SNA across two periods (1980–1999 and 2000–2017) and examining the changes in network centrality measures, the study offers initial insights into the evolving nature of the ISSM literature. Third, the study reports keyword network disconnections (i.e., structural holes) to propose a fruitful agenda for future ISSM research. Taken together, this research offers a current perspective of the ISSM research domains evolving nature.

Sales Research: Where is the Cutting Edge?

Professors Greg Marshall, William Locander, and Daniel Ladik proposed a special session for the Selling & Sales Management Track titled “Sales Research: Where is the Cutting Edge? ” at the 40th Anniversary Conference of the Academy of Marketing Science. Professor Daniel Ladik will present the data, theme by theme, while a panel of Professors Michael Ahearne, Andrea Dixon, Douglas Hughes, William Locander, and Greg Marshall, will comment on each theme. The explicit goal of this session is to explore cutting edge sales force research topics. A number of excellent articles have been published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management and elsewhere with a historical perspective examining where the sales discipline has been. By contrast, our study looks ahead and investigates where the sales discipline is heading, more in the spirit of Leigh and Marshall (2001).

Beyond Performance: The Reseller Salesperson as Brand Evangelist

Manufacturers and wholesalers distributing their products through retail channels depend heavily on retail salespeople to effectively interact with consumers on the supplier’s behalf. Retail salespeople frequently play an important role in the consumer’s purchase decision. Given retailers’ often wide brand assortment, capturing the attention and efforts of the retail salesperson can be challenging. However, since the retail salesperson serves as the manufacturer’s de facto contact point with the consumer, finding ways to increase the share of mind and effort among retail salespeople can be critical to the success of the brand. While salesperson performance in terms of sales is a natural concern for manufacturers and wholesalers, we suggest that there are also broader behaviors with which manufacturers and wholesalers should be concerned that contribute to the performance of the brand. Specifically, we study what leads salespeople to not only expend effort selling the brand, but also to contribute to the broader functioning of the brand in the marketplace. This supportive behavior, referred to as brand evangelism, is the salesperson’s propensity to actively recommend the brand to other people (even those who could not buy from him or her), to encourage retailer management and other employees to focus on the brand, and to verbally promote the brand with people he or she encounters. In this study, using an international sample of retail salespeople, the authors empirically demonstrate that manufacturers and wholesalers can create brand evangelists among retail salespeople by building strong attitudes toward the brand, the supplier representative, and consumer/trade promotions as partially mediated by brand identification. Salespeople who are brand evangelists not only expend in-role effort selling a brand, but also engage in extra-role promotion of a brand to management, coworkers, and the public.

The Indirect Effect of Advertising Perceptions on Salesperson Effort and Performance

Considerable research explores advertising’s role in influencing buyer perceptions and behavior. However, advertising’s impact on another key audience - the firm’s sales force - has been largely overlooked. Drawing from social identity and expectancy theories, and using survey and objective performance data from a sample of 200 field salespeople, we demonstrate that a salesperson’s perception of brand advertising has a significant effect on the effort placed in support of that brand, and resulting salesperson performance, by positively influencing the extent to which the salesperson identifies with the brand and his or her expectancy that such effort will generate results. More specifically, a salesperson’s perception of advertising quantity positively affects results expectancy, while attitudes towards the advertising message positively affect salesperson — brand identification. Brand identification influences salesperson performance not only through increased in-role effort, but also through the salesperson’s increased propensity to engage in brand-supportive extra role behaviors. Therefore, in addition to its well documented value in creating “pull,” advertising may also function as a “push” device, by facilitating salespeople’s identification with a brand and by engendering among salespeople stronger expectations that effort placed on a brand will result in improved sales performance. These results suggest that managers should not only pay attention to how brand advertising is being perceived by sales employees, but they should proactively work to influence salesperson perceptions via thoughtful and sufficient internal communications.