This study addresses the interrelationships between a business-to-business (B2B) salesperson’s sales performance and their level of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial sales actions. ...Data was collected through a survey of 252 participants (B2B salespeople working in Australia). Structured equation modeling was used to analyze and test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that entrepreneurial self-efficacy strongly influences sales innovativeness and creative selling, highlighting the importance of senior management encouraging and rewarding new selling methods (a salesperson’s entrepreneurial actions). Finally, these sales actions positively and significantly impacted individual sales performance. Thus, creative selling and sales innovativeness are powerful influencers of personal sales performance. This research contributes to the sales performance literature by highlighting the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), creative selling, and sales innovativeness. These findings provide additional lessons for senior management when pursuing increased growth and sales performance.As ESE has a positive impact on a salesperson’s actions and performance, senior management may wish to encourage an internal environment in which ESE behaviors are not only accepted but encouraged.
Purpose
This study aims to address the need to study salespersons’ thought self-leadership (TSL) and its effectiveness through the interplay of self-efficacy, skills and behavior at the individual ...level. It also advances the agenda of integrating self-leadership into marketing literature.
Design/methodology/approach
A model was tested using survey data collected from salespeople within pharmaceutical companies located in India and other Asian countries. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The results suggest an interesting interplay between a salesperson’s TSL and his/her sales performance. The results also demonstrate the relationship between TSL and self-efficacy and the mediation mechanism through which self-efficacy influences sales performance. Results support the role of TSL as a distal predictor of performance and delineate the complexity of the mediation mechanism through theoretical grounding and empirical evidence.
Research limitations/implications
The research suggests that a salesperson’s TSL relates positively with the sales performance through three process variables; self-efficacy, selling skills and adaptive selling behavior. The results should encourage managers to leverage salesperson’s TSL strategies to build a self-leading sales force and optimize supervision cost. Moreover, training the sales force for enhanced TSL has immediate payoffs in terms of increased selling effectiveness. The study also discusses theoretical implications.
Originality/value
By examining TSL in the sales context, the study makes an original contribution to the extant literature. The results of the study enrich the extant information on self-leadership and sales performance linkages by suggesting a mediation mechanism and proposing an integrated framework with selling skills and adaptive selling behavior.
Relational selling is at a crossroads: Some trends undermine salespeople's ability to build strong relationships (e-commerce, buying norms), but others emphasize the importance of such links ...(services, solutions). To anticipate the future of relational selling, this comprehensive review of research and practice seeks to clarify the impact of the changing conditions. Specifically, this study assesses relational selling from three perspectives. Perspective 1 is a temporal lens that reflects the evolution of relational selling, to delineate how it has changed over time. Perspective 2, a theoretical lens, then encompasses the key theories that provide a theoretical underpinning of relational selling and that can be refocused on emerging conditions to understand its future effectiveness. Finally, with an empirical lens in Perspective 3, this study identifies which relationship strategies are most effective and in what conditions. By combining these perspectives, this article derives six key tenets to guide managerial practice and research in relational selling.
•Increase the strategic role of inside sales organizations•Gain customer insights in the new e-commerce, privacy, and legal environment•Integrate relationship building across omnichannel interfaces•Use big data insights for more effective relational selling•Leverage artificial intelligence for relational selling
Create simple, engaging, and effective outputs that actually get results Billions of corporate dollars are spent every year on initiatives to help people succeed in their job, but much of it goes to ...waste. Across industries, people are scrambling to find what they need to grow and improve at work, and executives are left wondering why these initiatives aren't effective. Author Juliana Stancampiano has plumbed the depths of this massive disconnect with her team. With this book, she bridges the gap. Radical Outcomes is a blueprint for a new way of working. Instead of taking old methods and retrofitting them for new technology, Stancampiano unveils a collaborative, fast, and effective way of working that avoids randomness and organizational drag. The book offers a new way of working—the future of the way people and teams will work together. * Find out how to get tangible results through a structured process * Cut through noise and information overload to give people what they really need * Design the right output for the right outcome * Improve and succeed no matter where you are in the organization Find out how to create radical outcomes through high performing teams—and get started today.
This research aims to bridge the entrepreneurship and marketing/sales literature streams by studying how young firms enable their resource endowments using value-based selling. Drawing on ...effectuation logic, the authors examine how young firms can achieve sales growth by using human and financial resource slack during the early years of their existence and accounting for the impact of the variability of these resources over time. The integrated framework and hypotheses are tested using unique, multisource (survey and objective archival) longitudinal panel data from 71 young firms covering a seven-year period. As anticipated, the findings show that both financial and human resource slack are negatively related to young firms’ sales growth over time and that financial resource slack variability exerts a positive impact and human resource slack variability exerts a (nonsignificant) negative impact. The results also confirm the importance of value-based selling as a guiding mechanism that significantly alters the effects of both types of resource slack and their variability over time. While value-based selling can help a young firm use slack to grow more effectively, it also has a dark side in that it can stand in the way of risk taking.
Purpose
Value-based selling (VBS) is increasingly a key success factor in business to business (B2B) settings, but its relationship with digital solutions selling (DSS) has not been explored. This ...study aims to develop a motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA)-based model that shows how an individual salesperson’s task-specific motivation to implement DSS affects personal capabilities to engage in DSS-related internal coordination, customer networking and ultimately VBS behavior. The authors also account for the supervisor’s DSS-focused behavioral control as the opportunity variable, potentially influencing all other variables in the framework.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors test the model and hypotheses using data of 178 salespeople from a B2B company growing its digital solutions business. Path modeling and SmartPLS software are used to estimate the model.
Findings
The results demonstrate the key importance of DSS implementation motivation to implement VBS. The findings emphasize the mediating role of salespeople’s ability to collaborate with colleagues and engage in customer networking to configure the right idiosyncratic digital solutions and demonstrate these solutions’ economic value. Supervisors have a fundamental role in directly and indirectly stimulating DSS motivation, DSS-related customer networking ability and VBS.
Research limitations/implications
The study has several limitations. The authors examined a single company. In addition to internal coordination and customer networking, other relevant abilities of salespeople could be considered as mediators between DSS and VBS. Similarly, other opportunity factors may be analyzed in the future, such as supervisors’ risk orientation and ability to stimulate team spirit. Future research could also investigate other salespeople’s individual talents and additional organizational support variables that predict a salesperson’s behavioral and outcome performance in DSS and VBS.
Practical implications
Companies willing to adopt VBS should acquire, develop and retain salespeople characterized by strong motivation to implement DSS. Supervisors should adopt a DSS-focused behavioral control, and companies should support supervisors through appropriate training on how to manage detailed feedback to salespeople constructively and sales performance management systems that systematically track DSS-related sales force activities and results. Companies should also facilitate DSS-related teamwork, for example, through team incentives, and DSS-related customer networking, for instance, through appropriate sales enablement platforms and tools.
Originality/value
The research addresses the communalities and differences between solutions selling and VBS, suggesting a causal relationship. While prior research has analyzed solutions and value mainly as corporate strategies at the organizational level, the current study considers implementation at the individual salesperson level. The study focuses on digital solutions, which are more uncertain and complex to sell than traditional solutions.
Despite the growing recognition of the critical role of post-sale service on the salesperson-customer relationship, few studies have explored how salesperson service behaviors (SSB) are enhanced ...through tools such as sales-based customer relationship management (CRM) technology and social media. Using dyadic salesperson-customer data within a business-to-business context, this study analyzes the direct effects of sales-based CRM technology on the behaviors of diligence, information communication, inducements, empathy and sportsmanship. Additionally, the study examines the interactive effects of sales-based CRM technology and social media on these behaviors. The results indicate that sales-based CRM technology has a positive influence on SSBs and that salespeople using CRM technology in conjunction with social media are more likely to exhibit higher levels of SSBs than their counterparts with low social media technology use.
PDF
