Willy Bolander

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.

Does the Customer Matter Most? Exploring Strategic Frontline Employees’ Influence of Customers, the Internal Business Team, and External Business Partners

Marketing relationships have evolved from simple dyadic transactions between the firm and its customers into scenarios in which the firms frontline employees are required to manage a portfolio of stakeholder relationships. The authors begin by characterizing the “strategic” frontline employee (SFLE) as a focal marketing employee who, in the execution of his or her work, must influence a variety of stakeholder target groups, including (1) customers, (2) the internal business team, and (3) external business partners. The authors leverage data from SFLEs at two firms to explore the similarities and differences in SFLE influence tactic effectiveness across the three stakeholder groups. They find that the effectiveness of influence tactics in driving performance differs across stakeholder target types and, somewhat surprisingly, that the SFLEs influence of both the internal business team and external business partners has a greater effect on his or her performance than does influence directed at customers. The authors close with a discussion of the implications for theory and practice.

Product Innovativeness, Customer Newness, and New Product Performance: A Time-Lagged Examination of the Impact of Salesperson Selling Intentions on New Product Performance

In this time-lagged study, we illuminate the role of the sales force in new product introductions by examining the impact of salespeople’s selling intentions on new product performance. Survey responses from 439 salespeople selling one product and 362 salespeople selling a second product suggest that salespeople’s selling intention is a key mediating variable. In particular, product innovativeness has a positive impact and customer newness has a negative impact on new product performance. However, both variables work indirectly through salespeople’s intention to sell new products. We conclude with managerial implications of our fi ndings and directions for future research.

Learned Helplessness Among Newly Hired Salespeople and the Influence of Leadership

This article investigates the sales force socialization process, wherein newly hired salespeople often face failure-prone environments. Drawing from the learned helplessness paradigm, the authors hypothesize that cumulative periods of sales performance failure are associated with sales-oriented behavior intentions. In addition, the authors examine the influence of leadership, expecting core transformational leadership to have a diminishing effect as unmet sales goals accumulate. Study 1 finds support for these hypotheses using panel survey data from 221 new hires during six months of a furniture retailers sales force socialization process. Then, aiming to uncover the underlying mechanism driving salesperson helplessness and a managerial approach that has a sustained impact, the authors conduct Study 2, a scenario-based experiment focused on the business-to-business insurance industry. The authors find that perceived task difficulty mediates the focal relationship and that error management enables core transformational leadership to have a lasting effect such that new hires have the lowest sales-oriented behavior intentions when transformational sales managers encourage them to make errors during their interactions with customers and to actively learn from their failures.

Which influence tactics lead to sales performance? It is a matter of style

The application of influence is a key behaviour set at the heart of the sales role. But we know little about how or whether influence tactics affect salespeoples actual job performance. We extend existing research on salespeoples use of influence by: (1) showing that influence tactics can be used to predict objective sales performance (and delineating which tactics are most predictive); (2) demonstrating that the effect of tactics on performance varies across salespeople, and these patterns of influence effectiveness allow us to identify different influence ‘styles’ and (3) revealing that the influence styles our data uncover are not consistent with existing theoretical classifications of influence tactics. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications, and directions for future work.

Sales Education Efficacy: Examining the Relationship Between Sales Education and Sales Success

Sales education is on the rise and for good reason. Statistics say that sales jobs will continue to grow at a rapid rate over the next few years. Many universities are preparing their students to start their careers in the professional selling function through the inclusion of sales education in their business curriculum. Yet little research exists that investigates the relationship between sales education and sales performance on graduating from a college of business. This article seeks to fill this void in the sale pedagogy literature by assessing, empirically, the relationship between what is learned in university sales programs and the actual selling behaviors of recent graduates from these programs (vs. students who did not receive formal sales education in their undergraduate programs). Likewise, the relationship between sales education and extrinsic and intrinsic performance indicators is investigated. The findings suggest that university sales education is a significant contributor to sales rep performance. However, the results on the behaviors taught and those used in day-to-day selling were mixed.

Time, change, and longitudinally emergent conditions: understanding and applying longitudinal growth modeling in sales research

Despite calls for increased use of longitudinal data in academic sales research, the overwhelming majority of published studies utilize cross-sectional designs. Yet, given the critical importance of understanding the evolution of performance and other important outcomes, sales management, as a discipline, is particularly well suited for analysis using methodological techniques that properly account for the role of time. The purpose of this manuscript is to advocate for the increased use of longitudinal growth modeling (LGM), a technique for analyzing longitudinal data that can be applied by researchers to generate knowledge that can elude cross-sectional designs, in research on selling and sales management. In so doing, this article reviews extant research utilizing this technique and demonstrates that performing this type of analysis is well within the capabilities of many sales researchers, in terms of both ease of application and having access to the data necessary to generate insights from this methodology. The article also provides some topical areas in sales research that are particularly amenable to analysis using LGM in an effort to encourage future research in this area.

The Disruptive Impact of Customer Engagement on the Business-to-Consumer Sales Force

Customer engagement (CE) reflects the increased ease with which business-to-consumers (B2C) customers can engage with firms and other customers outside of face-to-face interactions. However, increased customer engagement brings with it uncertainty regarding the future of B2C salespeople. Traditionally, salespeople have been a firm’s primary method of engaging customers, but with customers now entering sales interactions highly engaged, the question is, are B2C salespeople still needed? To explore this timely issue, a focus group is employed and themes are developed, which interestingly run counter to suggestions in the literature that salespeople should act as “knowledge brokers” to create value with their customers. In fact, the findings indicate that face-to-face interaction may actually impede, rather than create, value. The chapter concludes by presenting theory-based solutions to this problem.

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.

Toward an optimal donation solicitation: Evidence from the field of the differential influence of donor-related and organization-related information on donation choice and amount

The present research decomposes consumer donation behavior into two components: donation choice (i.e., whether to donate) and donation amount (i.e., how much to donate). It then considers how information related to the donor and information related to characteristics of the soliciting organization may differentially influence the two decisions. Results from four field experiments suggest that donor-related appeals have a greater effect on the donation choice decision (vs. organization-related appeals), whereas organization-related appeals have a greater effect on the donation amount decision (vs. donor-related appeals). This might lead one to conclude that presenting both types of appeals in a solicitation is ideal. However, the studies presented herein also suggest that this strategy may backfire. The simultaneous presentation of donor- and organization-related appeals can hamper both donation response rates and average contribution amounts. To address this issue, the authors identify and test an alternative solicitation strategy for maximizing solicitation effectiveness. This strategy involves a multistep request process that capitalizes on an understanding of the differential influence of donor- and organization-related information on donation choice and amount decisions.