Keith A. Richards

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.

Key Account Management: Adding Elements of Account Fit to an Integrative Theoretical Framework

A growing scholarly interest in key account management highlights the need for a framework to use in the study of these accounts. This study combines theory from relationship marketing, personal selling, and organizational-level resource allocation studies to build an integrative theoretical framework explaining both relational and performance aspects of key accounts. In building this integrative model, a qualitative study of key account managers revealed that “fit” between the buying and selling company is of great importance. This concept of fit, which has largely been ignored in key account studies, is added as both an antecedent and a moderator in the integrative model.

The Motivation Hub: Effects of Goal Setting and Self-Efficacy on Effort and New Product Sales

This study examines the effects of goal setting on salesperson effort and new product sales. Employing the motivation hub’s theoretical framework, company-assigned goals (i.e., quotas), self-set goals, and self-efficacy are modeled as antecedents to selling effort and new product sales. To investigate the model, longitudinal data were collected from 143 industrial salespeople and combined with objective data from company records. The strength of this multisource, longitudinal data set allowed several important time-dependent relationships to be tested in the model. Seemingly unrelated regressions were employed to address the unique challenges the data provided. Results from the analysis reveal evidence of a nonlinear relationship between self-set goals and effort. Specifically, salespeople expend more effort as goal levels increase up to a certain point. Beyond this threshold, selling effort decreases as goal levels increase. The study also indicates that self-set goals fully mediate the relationship between assigned goals and selling effort. Finally, the longitudinal data indicate that company-assigned goals, self-set goals, and selling effort all positively influence future new product sales. Interestingly, the results of the study fail to confirm an inverted, U-shaped relationship between assigned goals and effort which opens up further questions for future research. Both theoretical and managerial implications are discussed based on this new evidence.

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.

Tracking and updating academic research in selling and sales management:a decade later

This study examines the state of academic research in selling and sales management (S&SM) from the years 2003–7, ten years after the data collected by Moncrief, Marshall, and Watkins (2000). Sales articles are reviewed that appeared in 19 marketing journals and evidence is provided on the state of the S&SM discipline by comparing the number of authors, authorships, and publications versus a comparable five-year period a decade ago. Of interest are the universities that produce and employ faculty in S&SM and to identify those schools and geographic regions that are publishing the majority of articles. Publication distribution trends across journals are also examined. A dramatic increase in non U.S. authors and authorships is noted versus the prior study. Overall, the findings indicate that, perhaps contrary to some popular misconceptions, the state of S&SM research is healthy, vibrant, and evolving.

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.

Why study intraorganizational issues in selling and sales management

Thanks to a wealth of research spanning over half a century, we know quite a lot about selling and sales management. For some excellent summaries of this body of work, we refer you to Albers, Mantrala, and Sridhar (2010); Franke and Park (2006); Samaraweera and Gelb (2015); Schrock et al. (2016); and Verbeke, Dietz, and Verwaal (2011), among others. However, it is worth pointing out that much of the work that makes up this literature stream shares a focus, even if implicitly, on customer-related research questions. For example, we can provide managers with a list of measurable dispositions that are likely to equip a salesperson to effectively influence customers – for example, adaptive selling (e.g., Agnihotri et al. 2017) and customer orientation (e.g., Goad and Jaramillo 2014). The same is true for customer-facing behaviors – we can teach salespeople a great deal about how to better influence (e.g., McFarland 2003; Plouffe, Bolander, and Cote 2014) and negotiate (e.g., Holmes et al. 2017; Uzo and Adigwe 2016) with customers to enhance performance outcomes. While this work is immeasurably valuable to the field, and while a focus on customer relationships is natural and defensible, we believe that the performance implications of intraorganizational relationships have, from time to time, gone under researched. Though we note some important exceptions in highly researched areas such as organizational and psychological climate (e.g., Gustafson, Pomirleanu, and Mariadoss 2018; Hochstein et al. 2017) and key account management (Ivens et al. 2016; Richards and Jones 2009), among others, we think that intraorganizational issues represent an area ripe for additional research and that deeper knowledge of these issues will help us provide better insights to practitioners about how to enhance salesperson performance. Two recent research examples support this belief. First, Bolander et al. (2015), using social network analysis, show the ability of salespeople’s intraorganizational network positions (relational and positional centrality) in predicting objective sales performance. In contrast to customer-directed sales research models that tend to explain 10%–20% of the variance in performance (Plouffe and Barclay 2007), this work shows that models of intrafirm network scores can predict 26.6% of this variance. Second, Plouffe et al. (2016) show, across multiple firms, that influence directed toward a salesperson’s internal business team and external business partners (both noncustomer stakeholder groups in the portfolio of relationships modern salespeople must manage) has a stronger relationship with objective performance than influence directed at customers. Put simply, these noncustomer groups (one of which is intraorganizational) are more important than customers in predicting performance. Using this recent evidence to justify the importance of the topic, we are very pleased to present you with this special issue of the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management on intraorganizational issues in selling and sales management. The articles in this issue are similar in that they touch on the idea that modern salespeople must manage a portfolio of relationships that includes various customer and noncustomer stakeholders (Plouffe et al. 2016). Importantly, these studies all approach different intraorganizational issues and make use of different types of data and analytic methods. This diversity in both topic and method is encouraging for the field as it broadens our ability to explore these important aspects of selling and to expand on our current insights. We should note that the order of these articles was largely determined by how well these topics fit together in terms of keeping the special issue interesting. We thought it appropriate to alternate between conceptual and empirical work, for example. The rest of this introduction provides brief summaries, and commentary, on each of the articles included in this special issue.