Techniques that reduce salesforce frustration

The failure of management to recognize frustration in sales personnel, or management's failure to manage frustration appropriately, can result in salespersons engaging in counter-productive behaviors that may lead to low sales productivity, a failure to achieve sales objectives, or customer ill-will. Salespeople must be equipped to work successfully in potentially frustrating situations. This article reports the results of a study that suggest which selling techniques can assist salespeople in reducing or avoiding commonly occuring frustrating sales situations.     

How salesperson perceptions of customers' pro-social behaviors help drive salesperson performance

By conceptualizing customers' organizational citizenship behavior as a communication cue, a customer evaluation criterion, and a sales performance facilitator in a relational selling context, the authors empirically demonstrate the effect of salespeople's perceptions of their customers' voluntary, prosocial behavior on three components of sales performance. The authors first hypothesize and confirm that salespeople can perceive their customers to exhibit organizational citizenship behavior, and that this important customer cue can serve as a customer evaluation criterion. The authors then demonstrate how salespeople can respond to their perceptions of customers' organizational citizenship behavior in performance-enhancing ways. Results from a sample of 628 business-to-business salespeople suggest that customer-involved sales performance fully mediates the relationship between customers' organizational citizenship behavior and salesperson behavioral performance, and that salesperson behavioral performance partially mediates the relationship between customer-involved sales performance and salesperson outcome productivity. These findings highlight the important role customer-involved sales performance plays as an antecedent to a salesperson's individual performance. Support for the notion that salespeople's perceptions and interpretations of their customers' organizational citizenship behavior can facilitate personal selling and augment sales performance has implications for sales training, salesperson evaluation, and customer evaluation. The authors discuss these and other implications for B2B researchers and practitioners.     

Applying territoriality to steps in the buyer/seller process

Territoriality is the drive of an individual to stake out, establish, maintain, and defend an area of space for personal use. The “area of space” may be physical or psychological. Industrial buyers and others involved in the buying process, as members of organizations, will act to establish individual territories within the organization and may also act to represent an organization's territorial needs. Because an understanding of the behavior of buyers is important to industrial sales people, and because the concept of territoriality is a mixture of psychological processes, physical behavior, and the space surrounding an individual, a Territoriality Scan System is proposed to assist the salesperson in improving his or her sales communications with industrial buyers. A salesperson can gather important information about an industrial buyer's psychological processes by observing the buyer's physical behavior and surrounding physical space using the Territoriality Scan System. These observational measurements can then be used to enhance the entire sales presentation.     

Exploratory navigation and salesperson performance: Investigating selected antecedents and boundary conditions in high-technology and financial services contexts

Salesperson behavior aimed at improving internal company response to customer requests has received little attention in the industrial marketing literature in comparison to external, customer-directed behaviors. In this study, the phenomenon of “salesperson navigation” (SpN) is developed within the context of a research model of selected antecedents and boundary-conditions that influence a primary form of navigational behavior, or “exploratory navigation”. The research model's utility in predicting sales performance is tested empirically with data from two Fortune 500 sales forces. The findings show that the traits of competitiveness and expert power significantly enhance the salesperson's propensity to engage in exploratory navigation behavior. Exploratory navigation, in turn, is found to have a significant and positive association with salesperson job performance, contingent upon specific boundary conditions within the salesperson's own organization (i.e., sales management support and internal competitive climate). The article concludes by offering sales researchers and industrial marketing managers implications derived from the study as well as directions for further work.     

Do business customers perceive what salespeople believe? Perceptions of salesperson adoption of innovations

A salesperson's commitment and effort toward an innovation can determine whether the customer agrees to buy it, such that customers' perceptions of such commitment and effort are critical. But these perceptions also might differ fundamentally from the salesperson's self-perceptions of commitment and effort. Therefore, this paper presents a theoretical framework of the relation between salesperson-perceived and customer-perceived commitment and effort, as exhibited by the salesperson while selling an innovation, which represents salesperson adoption. In the framework, job satisfaction factors also exert contingent, moderating effects. The authors gather unique, dyadic data from surveys of salespeople and their (potential) business customers during visits to sell a conventional, incremental innovation, complemented by objective purchase data gathered from company records. Three key insights emerge fromt this study. First, salespeople's own perceptions of their commitment and effort have only moderate influences on customers' perceptions of salespeople's commitment and effort. Second, customers seem to recognize salesperson effort more readily than salesperson commitment, although salesperson commitment has a higher sales performance impact than salesperson effort. Thus, sales managers should seek to encourage and support both the commitment of salespeople and also perceptions of that commitment among customers. Third, while a higher organizational support or job autonomy strengthens customers' perceptions of salesperson adoption, a higher pay satisfaction diminishes it. Thus, firms might need to find ways to increase the support for the salespeople and their autonomy and to reduce salespeople's satisfaction with their (direct) payments. In total, these findings suggest significant scientific and managerial implications.     

Emotions and salesperson propensity to leave: The effects of emotional intelligence and resilience

Emotions constitute a powerful psychological force that can significantly influence the behavior and performance of salespeople. However, emotions in the workplace still constitute an under-developed area of study, mainly in the field of sales. Sales turnover is also particularly important in relation to sales management due to the nature of sales positions, their historically high turnover levels, and the difficulty involved in filling them.In view of the need to broaden knowledge on how to more successfully retain valuable salespeople, and the fact that B2B selling jobs are not the same across the board, this paper, while controlling the type of selling situation, analyzes the influence of two emotional skills (i.e. emotional intelligence and resilience) on salesperson propensity to leave their organization, both directly and indirectly, through their impact on work–family conflict and emotional exhaustion. The moderating effect of servant leadership perceived by salespeople on the relationship between emotional exhaustion and intention to leave is also addressed. Information provided by 209 salespeople from 105 enterprises from various industries confirms the hypotheses put forward and highlights the importance of encouraging the development of emotional skills as a way of alleviating work stress and reducing salesperson turnover. In addition, the results confirm the contribution of servant leadership towards reducing the effect of emotional exhaustion on salesperson intention to leave.     

Sales management control level and competencies: Antecedents and consequences

The pursuit of superior salesperson performance and higher levels of sales organization effectiveness is a growing management priority. Management control is an important antecedent to several aspects of salesperson performance and organizational effectiveness. However, prior research has neglected two important issues. First, the impact of market orientation on sales manager control approaches has not been previously considered. Second, sales manager competencies in behavior-based control have not been examined, as research has focused on the level and form of control. Market orientation and the critical sales skills required of salespeople have strong antecedent relationships with sales manager control. Also, sales manager control competencies play a significant role in shaping salesperson performance, and the impact of control competencies is larger than control level. Sales manager control competencies play an important mediating role between sales manager control level and salesperson performance and sales organization effectiveness. Our findings are based on a study of British companies in which five hundred sales managers were sent surveys and 300 usable responses (a response rate of 60%) were returned. Three important implications derived from this study include: (1) sales managers need to translate market orientation into sales force behaviors; (2) control strategy should be aligned with sales force priorities; and (3) time and resources should be invested in training sales managers.     

An examination of salesperson bricolage during a critical sales disruption: Selling during the Covid-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has proven to be a disruptive and world-altering event often forcing professional salespeople to rapidly change the manner in which they do business. Thereby, this pandemic illuminates the importance of understanding salesperson characteristics and behaviors that enable sales success in disruptive environments. This study identifies COVID-19 as a Critical Sales Event and introduces the concept of “bricolage” to the larger body of sales literature. Bricolage is a combination of “making do” under environmental conditions of resource constraint. Bricolage characterizes a salesperson's ability to utilize available resources effectively by assessing available resources and working to reconfigure them in order to meet new challenges and create opportunities. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research from professional salespeople, this study identifies a salesperson's creativity, learning-orientation, and grit as three important antecedents to salesperson bricolage. Moreover, this study shows that salesperson bricolage relates positively to sales performance under conditions shaped by the COVID-19 disruption; with salesperson bricolage becoming more strongly related to sales performance when sales environments are more highly disrupted by the pandemic.     

Social media in B2B sales: Why and when does salesperson social media usage affect salesperson performance?

The importance of social media usage by B2B salespeople has been well documented in the sales literature. In particular, a B2B salesperson's use of social media to prospect for customers and adapt their sales approach have primarily been shown to explain sales performance. However, an increasing body of literature in the sales domain has called for B2B salespeople to be ambidextrous by engaging in service activities aimed at helping their customers. We argue that by giving B2B salespeople an opportunity to communicate directly with their customers, social media is used by salespeople to proactively service their customers and hence can play a critical role in driving sales performance. Drawing from the Task-Technology Fit theory, we develop and test a conceptual model in which B2B salesperson social media usage affects salesperson performance indirectly through value-oriented prospecting and proactive servicing. Additionally peer social media usage was a key moderator in the relationship between B2B salesperson social media usage on the one hand and value-oriented prospecting and proactive servicing on the other hand. We test the model with data from 171 B2B salespeople and find that salesperson social media usage relates positively with proactive servicing and value-oriented prospecting. While we did not find support for the relationship between social media usage and adaptive selling, we did find support for the impact of all three sales activities salesperson performance. In addition, results show that peer social media usage has positive moderating effects on the B2B salesperson social media usage and value-oriented prospecting/proactive servicing relationships.     

Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales

Social media have changed how buyers and sellers interact, and increased involvement through social media may yield positive results for sales organizations if salespeople utilize it in facilitating their behaviors. Through the perspective of value creation, we test the mediating effects of salesperson information communication behaviors between social media use and customer satisfaction. Using salesperson-reported data, within a B2B context, we empirically test a model using structural equation modeling. Salesperson's use of social media is found to impact information communication behaviors, which enhance salesperson responsiveness and customer satisfaction. Also, salesperson responsiveness is found to have a positive relationship with customer satisfaction. Findings suggest that social media plays an important role in communicating information to customers, but as an antecedent enhancing salesperson behaviors to increase customer satisfaction rather than a direct factor. This encourages managers to carefully assess goals related to social media use of their sales force.     

The impact of supervisory adaptive selling and supervisory feedback on salesperson performance

The paper investigated the moderating effects of supervisory adaptive selling behaviors on the feedback-performance relationship in industrial salespersons. A conceptual model was developed and three research hypotheses were empirically examined. The data were collected via a survey of a national random sample of industrial salespersons in US. The results indicated that adaptive selling behaviors by sales managers moderated the effects of positive behavioral feedback on salesperson performance. Positive output feedback had a significantly positive effect on salesperson performance, whereas negative feedback (output and behavior) was unrelated to salesperson performance. Thus, sales managers can improve the productivity of their salespeople by demonstrating adaptive selling techniques while providing positive feedback to them. Managerial implications were discussed.     

The ABC's of ACB: Unveiling a clear and present danger in the sales force

While anti-citizenship behavior (ACB) is under-researched across all academic domains, sales and marketing researchers have not done any work in the area. This oversight is significant given recent survey data that suggests sales representatives are misbehaving at an alarming rate; 60% of sales managers have caught their reps cheating on expense reports (an example of ACB) and 36% believe such behavior has gotten worse over the past several years. Directed towards the goal of understanding salesperson ACB, this research provides the first conceptual model of ACB in the sales force. The model contends that characteristics of the organization (justice and intra-firm competition) and contextual factors (fit and job stress) directly affect the performance of ACB while individual level factors (locus of control, self-monitoring and introversion) moderate the performance of these behaviors. In addition, this research explains the intra- and inter-organizational consequences of salesperson ACB and suggests several ways by which managers can address this issue.     

Activating salesperson resilience during the COVID-19 crisis: The roles of employer event communication and customer demandingness

Business-to-business (B2B) sales sector is among the business sectors severely affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. It is critical to understand how to help the workforce in the B2B sales sector grow resilient through such a crisis. The main aim of this study is to examine the role of employer event communication in fostering B2B salesperson resilience. The data were collected from 447 sales employees from manufacturing firms in an Asian emerging market during the pandemic crisis. The results revealed the positive link between employer event communication and salesperson resilience. Deliberate rumination was detected as a mediator for the relationship between employer event communication and resilience. However, while the significant and negative association was observed between employer event communication and intrusive rumination, the non-significant relationship occurred between intrusive rumination and resilience. Customer demandingness moderated the effects of intrusive and deliberate rumination on salesperson resilience. Discussions on theoretical and practical implications are displayed.     

Using humor in the industrial selling process

Humor is an oft used promotional tool in advertising, and the question naturally arises as to whether humor can also be designed to accomplish specific goals in the industrial selling process. In this article, principles of humor are applied to the buyer/seller process, with particular reference to the steps of the sale. The judicious use of humor by the industrial salesperson can enhance the sales presentation and favorably influence the overall buyer/seller relationship, provided the salesperson has adequate knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of humor.     

“I think I can…I think I can”: The impact of perceived selling efficacy and deal disclosure on salesperson escalation of commitment

Salespeople have considerable autonomy in the choices they make with respect to both the types and amounts of resources they deploy in pursuing potential customer accounts and specific sales opportunities. Building from a prospect theory framework and also leveraging self-justification theory, this research reports the results of three experimental studies conducted on practicing salespeople. The experiments help shed light on several factors that might influence a critical form of salesperson resource allocation decision — the allocation of the salesperson's own ‘selling time’ which is devoted to a specific sales opportunity. Study 1 establishes that an escalation of commitment effect exists when salespeople pursue a new customer opportunity, and that “competitive intensity” is a key variable that attenuates the escalation of commitment effect. Study 2 demonstrates that a salesperson's “selling efficacy” – or their confidence in their abilities and decision-making in sales – has important, but mixed, effects on the salesperson's allocation of scarce resources. Finally, study 3 broadens this research by showing that environmental factors such as the extent to which the salesperson has ‘disclosed’ their pursuit of a new sales opportunity within their own organization can also influence the escalation of commitment effect on how they allocate resources in pursuit of that business. The article's broader contribution is that it offers an overdue and preliminary glimpse into the levers which shape and influence how, when, and why salespeople apply resources in the pursuit of new customers.     

Salesperson communication effectiveness in a digital sales interaction

B2B buyers are exhibiting an increased preference to transact digitally with vendors. A topic which has yet to receive sufficient academic attention in this modern selling environment is salesperson communication effectiveness. Accordingly, this article: 1) defines digital sales interactions (DSIs) as technology-enabled, face-to-face buyer-seller exchanges; 2) proposes a typology of DSIs to set the stage to examine salesperson communication effectiveness; 3) introduces a framework that reifies the sender's auditory and visual cues that can influence receivers' thoughts (i.e., cognition, affect, intention) and activity (i.e., purchase behavior, advocacy); 4) suggests theoretical lenses that can illuminate various aspects of the salesperson's communication barrage; 5) advances how machine learning can be applied to understand what constitutes effective communication in a digital interaction by asking: to what extent does what a salesperson says (auditory cues) and how s/he says it (visual cues) impact her/his effectiveness in a DSI?; and 6) concludes by noting promising future research directions for B2B marketing researchers.     

How industrial salespeople gain customer trust

This study investigated how industrial salespeople gain the trust of their customers. Results show that trust increases as the customer gains the impression that the salesperson is dependable, honest, competent, customer oriented, and likeable. Based on the results, a general model of trust building is suggested.     

Sales force reactions to corporate social responsibility: Attributions, outcomes, and the mediating role of organizational trust

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is gaining momentum among researchers and practitioners. In spite of this extensive interest, systematic research regarding the effects of CSR on other stakeholder groups, besides consumers, remains sparse. Based on a field study in a global Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods company, we examine sales force attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of company's partnership with a United Nations (UN) philanthropic organization. Specifically, we seek to examine whether sales force perceptions of CSR motives influence their evaluation of CSR actions. Findings indicate that egoistic-driven motives negatively influence salesperson trust in the company, whereas stakeholder- and values-driven motives positively influence salesperson trust; however, strategic-driven attributions do not have an influence on salesperson trust. The results further reveal the mediating role of trust in the relationship between sales force attributions and outcomes including loyalty intentions and positive word-of-mouth.     

Can customer loyalty to a salesperson be harmful? Examining customer perceptions of salesperson emotional labor strategies post ethical transgressions

Past research suggests that customer loyalty is a critical component in successful business-to-business sales relationships. Challenging this view, this study suggests that customer loyalty may actually have an unexpected “dark side” to it. Specifically, grounded in Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, this research investigates the role that customer loyalty (to a salesperson) has on customer coping behavior post salesperson ethical transgressions. We take the often-underrepresented customer perspective in selling relationships to test our theoretical model using a field study that consists of 239 professional procurement specialists. Our results indicate that when customers believe that a salesperson is more genuine in displaying emotions, after an ethical transgression, customers are more likely to forgive, and less likely to seek revenge against or avoid the salesperson. On the other hand, when customers believe that a salesperson is “faking” emotions, customers are more likely to cope with ethical transgressions by avoiding and seeking revenge against the salesperson. Our study also finds that when an ethical transgression occurs, a “love becomes hate” effect occurs, where customer loyalty undermines a salesperson's efforts and does not always favor the salesperson.