Values,the key to business in 1990 and beyond∗

This article is concerned with the changes which have affected the personal selling function in industrial markets in recent years. It reviews research findings from the UK, Europe and America, and discusses the implications for sales force management and sales training. It concludes that industrial marketing must focus upon key account relationship management, rather than the manipulation of the four Ps in order to create competitive advantage, and that radical new approaches are needed in sales training which reflect the changing nature of the sales person's role, and which may be demonstrated to have a positive affect on selling effectiveness.     

Personal Selling and Sales Management in the Internet Environment: Lessons Learned

Researchers have suggested that businesses are undergoing a paradigm shift due to the emergence of Internet; a ubiquitous information platform. There is no doubt that its emergence has had and will continue to have considerable impact on business processes and practices. In this special issue of the JMM we address Internet's impact upon the personal selling and sales management processes and practices of contemporary firms. As co-editors of this special issue, we have had a chance to only publish a small set of papers. Therefore, in this editorial we attempt to explicate the lessons learned from the development of the Internet and associated information platforms, with the aim to address the broader issues that have emerged in this area. We specifically divide our discussion into Business to Consumer (B2C), Peer to Peer (P2P), and Business to Business (B2B) lesson. We first review learning from existing practices in the B2C, P2P, and B2B domains. This is followed by a discussion on the impact of the Internet on personal selling and sales management practices. At the end of this editorial, papers in this special issue are discussed with respect to their learning and positioning.     

A personal construct analysis of adaptive selling and sales experience

Customer orientation is a key to successful marketing strategies. In personal selling, customer orientation has been shown to be related to the quality of the customer-salesperson relationship (Saxe & Weitz, 1978). Adaptive selling (Weitz, Sujan, & Sujan, 1986) is a theoretical perspective that suggests sales performance is related to salespeople's ability to shift their customer orientation, by adapting their behavior to different customers in different situations. This article presents personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a framework for understanding how sales personnel perceive and adapt to customers. An interview technique known as laddering (Gutman, 1982; Hinkle, 1965) is used to elicit these constructs from sales personnel. Results of the interviews are compared across levels of sales experience. Consistent with the Sujan, Sujan, and Bettman (1988) findings relating sales effectiveness and breadth of knowledge structures, we find that the number of years of sales experience is related to the breadth of constructs obtained from the laddering interviews. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Organizational culture relationships with creativity and other job-related variables

The relationship between three types of organizational cultures and managerial creativity, motivation, and other job-related variables were examined. Respondents were 165 managers in a western metropolitan area (69 females, 96 males). Bureaucratic culture combined with high need for power was found to have significant positive relationships to job satisfaction and involvement, and negative connections to propensity to leave. Innovative culture combined with high need for achievement was significantly and positively related to job satisfaction and significantly and negatively to propensity to leave. Supportive culture combined with high need for affiliation was significantly and positively related to job satisfaction and negatively related to propensity to leave.     

The Ethics of Online Retailing: A Scale Development and Validation from the Consumers’ Perspective

While e-commerce has witnessed extensive growth in recent years, so has consumers’ concerns regarding ethical issues surrounding online shopping. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature, and limited in scope by focusing on consumers’ privacy issues. This study develops a reliable and valid scale to measure consumers’ perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers (CPEOR). Findings indicate that the four factors of the scale – security, privacy, non-deception and fulfillment/reliability – are strongly predictive of online consumers’ satisfaction and trust. The results offer important implications for e-retailers and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of e-ethics from the consumers’ perspective. Sergio Román is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Murcia (Spain). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Arizona. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review, International Journal of Market Research, European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Management. His research interests are focused on personal selling and sales management, international marketing and business ethics.     

An Exploratory Analysis of the Impact of Salesperson Customer-Orientation on Sales Force Productivity

Abstract

Consumer sovereignty is a concept that is well-established in the marketing literature. It is widely assumed the customer satisfaction is a crucial variable in determining the long-run prosperity of a business. Since the sales force often has the most contact with the customer, it seems logical that their efforts toward satisfying the client would be imperative. The selling orientation-customer orientation (SOCO) scale developed by Saxe and Weitz (1982) was used to determine the customer-orientation of 180 real estate sales personnel. The results of the research indicate that real estate sales representatives can practice customer-oriented selling without fear of losing sales due to their being too “soft” in their selling methods. In addition, the results indicate that companies wishing to enhance their sales personnel's level of customer-orientation may do so through professionally designed sales training programs.     

Allocating a Promotion Budget between Advertising and Sales Contest Prizes: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective

This paper develops and analyzes a normative model for allocating a fixed, short-term promotion budget between product advertising and prizes of a rank-order sales contest for a homogeneous sales force when sales are driven by both personal selling effort and advertising. The model provides insights into how the optimal budget allocations vary with the synergy between advertising and selling effort, sales force size, salesperson risk-tolerance, perceived cost of effort, selling effectiveness and sales response uncertainty. The analysis highlights the need for and value of close coordination between marketing and sales management in designing a promotion program involving both advertising and sales force incentives.     

Predictive Power of Personal Factors in Studying Students' Perception of Sales Profession in Poland

Since Poland has become a member of the European Union, free market activities have increased dramatically. The purpose of this study is to explore university students' perceptions of personal selling as a career in Poland. Using logistic regression and Z-test methodologies, we analyzed the perceptions of 114 students. The results confirm the findings of previous studies that personal factors play a significant role in predicting students' perception of sales profession as a career. The findings presented in this study show that Polish students have a biased perception about sales as a career; however, interestingly, few dimensions show a significant effect. Understanding students' perceptions of the sales profession will help corporate recruiters achieve their goals by selecting those students most likely to excel in sales careers.     

Revisiting the Purpose of Selling: Toward a Model of Responsible Selling

Selling as a profession and sales management as an organizational function have undergone major changes that were driven by the evolutionary journey of the marketing discipline. The extant value cocreation paradigm is recrafting the purpose of selling. This paper explores the conceptual development of a selling paradigm that is more responsible to its customers. Specifically, in Business-to-Business (B2B) context, the cost of any selling behavior that compromises customer interest could be of disastrous proportions. Building on the theoretical foundations of self-regulation and job demands-resources theory, this paper develops a conceptual model of responsible selling by integrating self-leadership literature with the emerging paradigm of value-based selling. The conceptual model outlines several research propositions for empirical validation and discusses its potential implications for sales managers and sales organizations.     

Do Mystery Shoppers Really Predict Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance?

Mystery shopping (MS) is a widely used tool to monitor the quality of service and personal selling. In consultative retail settings, assessments of mystery shoppers are supposed to capture the most relevant aspects of salespeople’s service and sales behavior. Given the important conclusions drawn by managers from MS results, the standard assumption seems to be that assessments of mystery shoppers are strongly related to customer satisfaction and sales performance. However, surprisingly scant empirical evidence supports this assumption. We test the relationship between MS assessments and customer evaluations and sales performance with large-scale data from three service retail chains. Surprisingly, we do not find a substantial correlation. The results show that mystery shoppers are not good proxies for real customers. While MS assessments are not related to sales, our findings confirm the established correlation between customer satisfaction measurements and sales results.     

Third‐person perception and purchase behavior in response to various selling methods

Two studies investigated whether various tactics of personal selling that generate different levels of resistance also produce different degrees of third‐person perceptions. Furthermore, the studies compared third‐person perceptions to the actual influence on behavior. Study 1 showed that more direct and blatant selling methods produce more TPP. Study 2 showed that people tend to underestimate the influence of the more direct method, especially with regard to themselves. The study concludes by identifying the ideal selling method as one in which the customers are asked about their willingness to listen to the sales campaign before they are told about it. This method increases sales and creates satisfied customers. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Ethics in Personal Selling and Sales Management: A Review of the Literature Focusing on Empirical Findings and Conceptual Foundations

Research into the ethics of personal selling and sales management has continued to increase in volume and importance. Because there is now a diversity of opinions and findings in this literature, an assessment of the status of existing knowledge is needed to provide focus and clarity. There have been no comprehensive reviews of the studies of ethics and salespeople, sales managers or sales management, despite recent attention from researchers, practitioners and the general public. The purpose of this review is to comment upon the more significant research in the sales ethics field with the objective of providing insight into the extent and direction of this knowledge, to evaluate the basis upon which it is founded, and to suggest areas of exploration that may be useful for increasing our understanding of it.     

Exploring communication differences between women and men sales representatives in a relationship selling context

The purpose of this exploratory research is to investigate the different styles of communication used by women and men sales representatives in relationship selling. An analysis of in-depth interviews revealed that the language used by women sales representatives is more conducive to building customer trust and more suggestive of relationship selling behaviour than the language used by their male counterparts. That women sales representatives may draw upon nurturing language and behaviour learned in developing other relationships (wife, mother, daughter, sister or friend) to build customer relationships is consistent with role theory and supports a theoretical explanation for the lower levels of role conflict surprisingly reported by women sales representatives in previous research. The results suggest that in a relationship selling task, marketing managers should consider using sales representatives with a 'feminine' style for sales jobs requiring extensive customer relationships. Directions for future research are also suggested.     

Storytelling during retail sales encounters

Many researchers have emphasized the importance of communication in personal selling. Psychologists and researchers in management and advertising have recognized the importance of communication via stories, but this has not extended to research in sales. This paper uses a framework developed from exploratory field work and the literature on stories to investigate storytelling by retail salespeople in three similar experimental studies. The experiments manipulate personal versus business stories across three different topic areas: entity, product, and digression. The results suggest that product stories told from a business point of view may be most effective in enhancing consumers’ purchase intentions in onetime sales encounters.     

Individual and contextual influences on the affective commitment of retail salespeople

Abstract

Salesperson characteristics as well as managerial approaches have been found to play an important role in the development of positive attitudes by salespersons towards an organisation. This study integrates these two research areas to investigate the personal and contextual antecedents of affective organisational commitment of retail salespeople. Fit theory and the literature on person–situation interaction provide the theoretical bases for explaining how salesperson selling skills, job liking, and empowerment individually and jointly influence affective commitment. A multilevel modelling approach is used to analyse data from 105 sales managers and 419 salespeople. Findings reveal that salespersons' affective commitment is influenced by their selling skills, degree of job liking, tenure, and empowerment. The results also indicate that the impact of selling skills on affective commitment is higher when empowerment is high. Based on the study's findings, implications for managing salespeople as well as limitations and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Understanding the relationships between online entrepreneurs’ personal innovativeness,risk taking,and satisfaction: Comparison of pure-play and click-and-mortar

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of personal innovativeness and risk taking on online entrepreneurs’ satisfaction. Two types of online entrepreneurs (pure-play and click-and-mortar) are compared and contrasted. Specifically, our study investigates the effect of personal innovativeness and risk-taking propensity on the satisfaction of online entrepreneurs, and compares the similarities and differences among varying types of online entrepreneurs. A survey of online entrepreneurs conducted in Taiwan, a country characterized as good for small and medium enterprises entrepreneurship and as having substantial e-commerce development, indicates that personal general innovativeness has a significant positive effect on personal information technology innovativeness (the entrepreneur’s level of innovation regarding information technology), entrepreneurial satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Entrepreneurs’ life satisfaction also determined by their degrees of entrepreneurial satisfaction. Finally, risk-taking propensity significantly influences entrepreneurial satisfaction for pure-play entrepreneurs only. The results can be referenced by other countries in general, and Chinese regions in particular.     

Selling and sales management

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcst.htm), almost 14 million Americans are employed in sales or sales-related jobs. Many organizations derive their entire revenue stream from the efforts of salespeople. As part of the domain of marketing, the academic study of selling and sales management is relatively young. Consider that the Journal of Marketing has been published for 70 years, while the Journal of Marketing Research has been in publication for 43 years (www.marketingpower.com). For its part, the specialized journal in selling and sales management, The Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, has been published for just 26 years. Therefore, while there are a great many widely-used and studied models in the field, there is still much to be learned about this topic. As highlighted in this article, the research published in 2006 indicates the range of interesting and relevant work being conducted in the area.     

The Selling Cycle

Abstract

The selling cycle, a measure of calendar time from the initiation to the completion of a sale, is a significant factor in planning and assessing sales force deployment. Empirically-based analyses of the selling cycle are nonexistent, however. This paper reports an exploratory study of selected relationships involving the length of the selling cycle in various selling situations and in different types of sales organizations, and then concludes with management implications and further research ideas.     

Improving sales performance through ethics: The relationship between salesperson moral judgment and job performance

This study examines the relationship between salespeople's moral judgment and their job performance. Results indicate a positive relationship between moral judgment and job performance when certain characteristics are present. Implications for sales managers and sales researchers are provided. Additionally, directions for future research are given. Charles H. Schwepker, Jr. is Associate Professor of Marketing at Central Missouri State University. His research interests are in sales, sales management, marketing ethics and consumer behavior. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice and Industrial Marketing Management, as well as various national and regional proceedings. Thomas N. Ingram is Professor of Marketing and Department Chair, Marketing Department, Colorado State University. His primary research interest is in personal selling and sales management. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, among others. He is the coauthor of Sales Management: Analysis and Decision-Making, 2nd ed. (The Dryden Press, 1992) and coauthor of Marketing: Principles & Perspectives (IRWIN, 1995).