The revolution in information availability and the advances in novel interaction technologies have ushered in two major shifts that call into question the traditional assumptions of buyer–seller ...interactions. First, buyer–seller
information asymmetry
has greatly decreased in many interactions. Second, face-to-face communication is no longer the main format of buyer–seller interactions. In this article, the authors review empirical research on how these shifts have changed buyer–seller negotiations, an important type of buyer–seller interactions. Several insights arise from this review. First, the shifts have caused fundamental changes in buyers’ and sellers’ roles, power, and aspirations and information processing. Second, the shifts and these fundamental changes together cause major changes in buyer–seller interactional processes and outcomes, including (1) change in buyers’ attitude and behavior, (2) change in sellers’ effectiveness in interacting with buyers, and (3) change in buyer–seller interactional processes. Based on these insights, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the reexamination of existing theories and the development of new theories of buyer–seller interactions.
Open Negotiation Atefi, Yashar; Ahearne, Michael; Hohenberg, Sebastian ...
Journal of marketing research,
12/2020, Letnik:
57, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Negotiations today are less likely to be characterized by information asymmetry—the notion that buyers are less informed than sellers—due to the amount of information available to buyers. A number of ...industries have reacted to this change by shifting their attention to earning profits in aftermarkets: products and services that augment the main purchase (e.g., add-ons, insurance, financing, service and maintenance). In these aftermarkets, firms often retain an information advantage, even if information asymmetries are eliminated from the main purchase. This has given rise to an interesting setting untapped by prior research: information "symmetry" in the front end (main purchase) and information "asymmetry" in the back end (aftermarket). The authors argue that symmetry in the front end provides an opportunity to build trust, as the knowledgeable customer can verify the information disclosed by the seller. In an observational study in the automotive industry, the authors find that customers to whom the salesperson revealed the cost of a car at the beginning of the negotiation spent significantly more in the back end than others. As corroborated in subsequent studies, this effect holds only when cost is disclosed at the beginning of the negotiation and when customers can verify the cost information.
Many new marketing strategies falter in the execution phase where managers fail to make frontline employees fully committed to implementing the new initiatives. While formal managers can apply ...transformational and transactional leadership behaviors to increase salespeople’s strategy commitment, peers can also exert a great deal of informal influence on salespeople. Building on recent social network perspectives of leadership, this paper investigates the interplay between the sales manager’s leadership styles and peer effects during the implementation of a new strategy in a large sales organization. The authors find that salespeople with high network centrality but low strategy commitment not only lower their peers’ commitment but also hurt the effectiveness of a transformational manager. Specially, the influence of a central salesperson becomes stronger when the sales group has lower external connectivity. However, sales managers’ transactional leadership can decrease the non-committed central salesperson’s influence over peers.
Performance rankings are a widely used motivational tool in sales organizations, yet their effectiveness in influencing important salesperson outcomes remains largely underexplored. Moreover, the ...impact of presenting different types of information alongside rankings has not been previously investigated. This research, spanning two studies with more than 27,000 salespeople from over 170 firms representing 83 countries, directly addresses this research gap, examining the effects of three distinct information conditions: anonymized performance rankings, identifiable performance rankings, and identifiable rankings with quotas on salesperson quota attainment and turnover. Additionally, the authors examine the role of variable compensation share and ranking group size, offering nuanced insights into their moderating effects. The findings reveal that anonymous rankings, while beneficial for quota attainment, increase turnover. On the other hand, identifiable rankings coupled with quotas do not significantly improve quota attainment but effectively reduce turnover. The authors find that disclosing performance rankings with salespeople’s identities is the sole condition that simultaneously elevates quota attainment and reduces turnover. By delineating these nuances, this research provides new and important implications to several literature streams and equips sales managers with strategic guidance on tailoring the presentation of performance rankings to enhance critical outcomes within the specific context of their organizations.
Different package designs call for different ways of revealing the product. In this research, we demonstrate that packaging that calls for unveiling—the removal of the cover of a concealed, ...stationary object—enhances the perceived value of the product compared to other forms of product revelation. Drawing on theories of grounded associations, shared meaning, and contagion, we theorize that the act of unveiling is associated with revealing a protected and thus pristine object, which is consequently perceived to be valuable. We begin the empirical investigation by exploring consumer associations with product unveiling across American and South Korean consumers (pilot study 1). We then demonstrate that the unveiling effect arises with both imagined (pilot study 2) and real objects and is mediated by beliefs about the pristine condition of the object (studies 1–3). We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical contributions, implications for managers, and directions for future research.
Does Selective Sales Force Training Work? Atefi, Yashar; Ahearne, Michael; Maxham, James G. ...
Journal of marketing research,
10/2018, Letnik:
55, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Companies spend billions of dollars annually on sales force training, often carried out as off-site, multiday training events. However, the numerous challenges involved in training an entire sales ...group force many retailers to selectively train only a subset of their salespeople. It is crucial to know when selective training can be more effective and what composition of salespeople should be trained to benefit the entire group. This study addresses these questions using data from several stores of a retailer with different sales force training policies (full, selective, and no training control). The authors track the degree to which salespeople applied a customer relationship—building strategy taught in the training, along with more than 30 store- and salesperson-level covariates, and perform various analyses to correct for selection issues. They find that (1) selective training can be highly effective in stores with low performance diversity, (2) training salespeople with diverse tenures helps the spillover of training to the untrained, and (3) untrained salespeople with performance that is similar to the trained group are more likely to adopt the training-related behavior.
Team and individual incentives are ubiquitous in sales, but little is known about their impact on collaboration when they are applied simultaneously. The presence of both types of incentives creates ...a “coopetitive” environment, where forces of collaboration and competition coexist. We examine how such environments impact the likelihood (Study 1) and the effectiveness (Study 2) of collaboration in the form of advice exchange. Exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) of network data of 540 salespeople reveals that individual incentives promote advice seeking but discourage advice giving, and team incentives stimulate advice giving but reduce advice seeking (Study 1). We also find that the effectiveness of advice depends on advice givers (Study 2). In particular, when advice givers have diverse team incentives, the advice is more effective and the need for additional advice is reduced, but when advice givers have diverse individual incentives, the advice is less effective and additional advice helps.
The salesperson-customer interaction is paramount, not only to the immediate transaction, but also to customer's future value for the firm. Despite this importance, meager research explicitly ...explores the effect of salespeople on customer's future visits. In this dissertation I examine the role of salespeople not only in bringing customers back for repeat purchases, but also in developing other revenue streams such as service from the same customers. Essay 1 examines how using successful customer relationship strategies can spill over among salespeople. I report a unique quasi-experiment in which an upscale apparel retailer trains its salespeople to adopt B2B account management and relationship-building strategies and apply them to their customers hoping to bring them back to the store. I studied more than 1,400 salespeople at about 200 stores measuring the degree to which they engage in the specific relationship-building behavior, their pre- and post-training performances, and more than 30 individual- and store-level covariates over the years before and after the training. Moreover the stores fell into three categories: a) full stores wherein the entire sales force are trained to adopt the relationship building strategy, b) partial stores wherein only a subset of the salesforce are trained, and c) control stores in which no one is trained. I employed recently-developed matching methods to obviate selection bias from store- and individual-level analyses. Drawing from literature on information dissemination in competitive contexts as well as demographic diversity I hypothesized and found that (1) partial training can be as effective as full-training in stores with low performance diversity, (2) tenure homogeneity of the trained salespeople helps their individual outcomes but hurts the spillover of the relationship-building behavior to the untrained salespeople, and (3) untrained individuals with similar performances to the group of trained salespeople are more likely to adopt the relationship building behavior. Essay 2 investigates whether what happens between salespeople and customers during a sales negotiation can affect customer's future value. In particular, I explored whether open negotiation, manifested by information disclosure by the seller, can affect customers' immediate future (e.g. cross-selling revenues, finance and insurance, etc.) and distant future (e.g. service encounters, repeat purchase) value. Utilizing three sets of data, a primary data set with records of actual sales negotiations between salespeople and customers in more than 400 auto purchase transactions, a secondary data set with all the sales transactions of the same dealerships, and a dataset obtained from the service departments of those dealerships, I explored the role of open negotiation strategy on the backend gross profits and the likelihood of customers returning for service. I found that when salespeople disclose the invoice price of the customer's desired car, the frontend gross profits would predictably be significantly lower than when they did not disclose the invoice price. However, disclosing the invoice early in the negotiation significantly helped both the backend gross and service likelihood, compared to not disclosing or middle/late disclosure. I hypothesized that because the internet informs customers about invoice prices, early invoice disclosure in the frontend helps build customer trust, which firms manipulate in the backend of the deal for which far less information exists for customers. I also found that early disclosure significantly predicts service come-back, even after controlling for customer distance to the dealership. I also explored the moderating role of channel (internet vs. dealership) on the effect of open negotiation on customer future value.
Keratoacanthomas (KAs) and cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas (cuSCCs) develop in 15–30% of patients with BRAFV600E metastatic melanoma treated with BRAF inhibitors (BRAFi). These lesions resemble ...mouse skin tumors induced by the two-stage DMBA/TPA skin carcinogenesis protocol; in this protocol BRAFi accelerates tumor induction. Since prior studies demonstrated cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) is necessary for DMBA/TPA tumor induction, we hypothesized that COX-2 inhibition might prevent BRAFi-accelerated skin tumors. Celecoxib, a COX-2 inhibitor, significantly delayed tumor acceleration by the BRAFi inhibitor PLX7420 and decreased tumor number by 90%. Tumor gene expression profiling demonstrated that celecoxib partially reversed the PLX4720-induced gene signature. In PDV cuSCC cells, vemurafenib (a clinically approved BRAFi) increased ERK phosphorylation and soft agar colony formation; both responses were greatly decreased by celecoxib. In clinical trials trametinib, a MEK inhibitor (MEKi) increases BRAFi therapy efficacy in BRAFV600E melanomas and reduces BRAFi-induced KA and cuSCC frequency. Trametinib also reduced vemurafenib-induced PDV soft agar colonies, but less efficiently than celecoxib. The trametinb/celecoxib combination was more effective than either inhibitor alone. In conclusion, celecoxib suppressed both BRAFi-accelerated skin tumors and soft-agar colonies, warranting its testing as a chemopreventive agent for non-melanoma skin lesions in patients treated with BRAFi alone or in combination with MEKi.
•Celecoxib delays squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) tumor acceleration by PLX7420.•It also decreases SCC tumor number by 90%.•It partially reversed the PLX4720-induced gene signature.•Trametinb/celecoxib combination is more effective than either inhibitor alone.
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