Technology improves sales performance—doesn't it?: An introduction to the special issue on selling and sales technology

Firms around the globe are rushing to invest in sales force technology or sales force automation (SFA). SFA appears to mean different things to different people. For example, management and sales personnel view the need for, application of, and advantages of SFA quite distinctly. As a result of technology, this special issue examines many areas of sales force automation to provide both practicing managers and sales force academicians with a clearer perspective of new technology in the B2B marketplace. This article introduces the special issue topic, individual contributors, and acknowledges support proffered by myriad individuals.     

Sales technology within the salesperson's relationships: A research agenda

The average cost of a sales call has declined approximately 15% over the past decade, while average salesperson compensation has doubled. These statistics illustrate an important benefit of technology: salespeople are more productive. To better understand the impact technology has played on sales and sales management, this paper examines the impact of sales technology from four perspectives: the salesperson, the field sales manager, the sales executive, and the customer. Noting that the needs and evaluations of technology vary, depending upon the functional position and viewpoint, a research agenda is offered that reflects these various perspectives.     

The adoption of information technology in the sales force

The purpose of this article is to explain why salespeople adopt information technology. The results from a cross-sectional study of 229 salespeople indicate that putting sales technology to use strongly depends on salespeople's perceptions about the technology enhancing their performance, their personal innovativeness and organizational efforts in terms of user training. Throughout the adoption process companies also need to target sales line managers-next to end users-because salespeople clearly comply with the expectations of their supervisors. Finally, the threat from competing sales professionals or peers who use similar sales technology seems to be of secondary importance for individual sales technology adoption.     

Impact of sales force automation on technology-related stress, effort, and technology usage among salespeople

This study unveils factors affecting sales force automation (SFA) technology usage by salespeople. It differs from previous research by: (1) proposing a model that examines the consequences of task complexity on role perceptions and technology usage, and (2) understanding the negative repercussions of SFA technology on the user. The proposed model was tested using data from 150 salespeople employed by a national organization. The results suggest that integration of SFA technology induces adverse role perceptions in salespeople. However, controlling for extraneous variables, effort is significantly related to salespeople's usage of technology. Key managerial implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Sales force technology usage—reasons, barriers, and support: An exploratory investigation

Increasingly, salespeople are being asked to adopt and use a variety of technologies to increase their selling productivity and efficiency, including sales force automation and customer relationship management technologies. However, little research has investigated what happens once sales force automation (SFA) technology is adopted. This paper explores the reasons why salespeople use SFA technologies, the perceived barriers to SFA usage and how management can increase the usage of SFA technology. First, a qualitative study was performed to gain insight about salespeople's automation technology usage and the reasons why some salespeople fully use or do not utilize technology. After the initial study, 130 salespeople were surveyed. More productivity/efficiency was the main reason why salespeople use technology, the lack of management and technical support proved to be the main barrier to usage, and training proved most effective in increasing usage of SFA technology. Sales managers are provided with implications of the findings.     

Genetic risk and value

A conceptual truth about risks is that they involve a possible and future adverse effect or a negative value of some kind. The genetic risks that individuals may face in the health care setting differ in some crucial respects to other kind of risks. The aims of this paper are to analyse the notion of value in the context of genetic risk in the setting of health care, and to suggest a conception of the evaluative aspect of genetic risk that is fruitful for genetic risk information. Two influential and relevant approaches to value, preferentialism and the capability approach, are discussed in the light of certain distinctive features of genetic risk and a third, a sensibility theory of value is suggested. According to this view, the concept of risk is a so-called ‘thick’ evaluative concept that has both a world-guiding function as well as an action-guiding or normative function. It is argued that this provides a more promising way to think about genetic risks in the clinical setting.     

Picking on the poor: the contradictions of theory and neo-liberal critique. A response to Stasja Koot's paper on the contradictions of capitalism for Indigenous tourism in the South African Kalahari

The relevance of neo-liberal critique of a community-owned, but commercially managed lodge, is examined with regard to Stasja Koot's paper on “The contradictions of capitalism” published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism in 2016. Koot focuses on the ≠Khomani Bushmen's relationship with !Xaus Lodge in the Kalahari Desert. His argument locates this small facility as an exemplar of the global contradictions of capitalism in the tourism sector. My response critiques Koot's methodology, theory and conclusions. It provides the missing history of the project discussed, and details the financial evidence that cautions Koot's speculative interpretations. My analysis cautions the relevance and use of Koot's application of David Harvey's Marxist-derived theory of spatial and temporal fixes. This response's assessment is that Koot's conclusions are arrived at without sufficient supporting evidence, and that his theory-led argument conceals a myriad of contextual contradictions that question the unproblematic application of Harvey's theory into a political economic context for which it was not designed. Some comment is offered on researcher positions and responsibilities and on how to interpret responses offered by ≠Khomani sources, whose own playful (and sometimes wilful) exploitation of researchers results in information that must always be triangulated for accuracy.     

Can teaching social dilemmas make people more prosocial? An experiment

Economics and business students regularly behave less prosocially than others. Can ethics training reverse this tendency? Results from a repeated public goods experiment reveal that it can. Students who attend an interactive lecture on social dilemmas show significantly more cooperation than others. However, the lecture does not appear to increase the incidence of reciprocal behavior. As many current social problems qualify as social dilemmas, this result stresses the importance of ethics training for policy makers and curriculum designers alike in overcoming the incentive structure of social dilemmas.     

Is Part-Time Employment after Childbirth a Stepping-Stone into Full-Time Work? A Cohort Study for East and West Germany

Does part-time work support first-time mothers’ employment by providing a stepping-stone into full-time work in Germany? Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984–2012, this study compares three different age cohorts of first-time East and West German mothers to investigate whether there has been any convergence between East and West Germany in the way women use part-time employment. Results show that mothers in West Germany in all cohorts tended to remain in part-time employment for longer periods than those in East Germany. Part-time employment more often provided a stepping-stone into full-time employment in East Germany than in West Germany. East German women who gave birth after reunification were less likely than older cohorts to experience a transition from part-time to full-time work. Thus, part-time employment not followed by subsequent full-time work has become more common in the East.     

Industrial land price between China’s Pearl River Delta and Southeast Asian regions: Competition or Coopetition?

The planned economy system’s previous form of industrial land market control in China has led to current market failure because of a large amount of industrial land being sold at a very low price, causing extensive overuse of land and negative effects on land management. As the “World Factory”, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is well known for its rapid urbanization largely driven by Foreign Direct Investment in labor-intensive industries. A low-land price strategy has been commonly adopted by the local government in order to attract industrial investment. In the past decade, the PRD has increasingly faced the increasing competition from its neighboring competition from its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia that have established preference policies to attract FDI and foreign enterprises. Despite a growing body of literature on the internal forces of industrial land in China, little is known of the external forces involved except for the importance of FDI and the intensity of interregional competition between China and other countries in attempting to attract foreign investment. This research fills the knowledge gap by modeling the situation in the form of an international cooperative game model aimed at revealing the industrial land price formation mechanism between the PRD region and Southeast Asian regions. The conditions of industrial land in the area and several Southeast Asian countries are first analyzed for their industrial land price movements in recent years. A game theoretic model is then built that exhibits similar characteristics. The result indicates that the governments’ low land price strategy and the competition between the PRD and its neighboring countries have created unnecessarily high social and environmental costs. Policy suggestions are made to encourage a more appropriate use of industrial land in China, and the most important being the need for a mindset shift from competition towards coopetition between the PRD and Southeast Asian regions.