The Faces of Success Peng, Ling; Cui, Geng; Chung, Yuho ...
Journal of marketing,
07/2020, Letnik:
84, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Given the positive bias toward attractive people in society, online sellers are justifiably apprehensive about perceptions of their profile pictures. Although the existing literature emphasizes the ...“beauty premium” and the “ugliness penalty,” the current studies of seller profile pictures on customer-to-customer e-commerce platforms find a U-shaped relationship between facial attractiveness and product sales (i.e., both beauty and ugliness premiums and, thus, a “plainness penalty”). By analyzing two large data sets, the authors find that both attractive and unattractive people sell significantly more than plain-looking people. Two online experiments reveal that attractive sellers enjoy greater source credibility due to perceived sociability and competence, whereas unattractive sellers are considered more believable on the basis of their perceived competence. While a beauty premium is apparent for appearance-relevant products, an ugliness premium is more pronounced for expertise-relevant products and for female consumers evaluating male sellers. These findings highlight the influence of facial appearance as a key vehicle for impression formation in online platforms and its complex effects in e-commerce and marketing.
This paper examines the use of social media by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople to assist in their job functions. The authors propose that a salesperson's attitude toward social media ...usefulness, as well as a salesperson's learning orientation, will influence how much a salesperson uses social media to assist in day-to-day job tasks. Additionally, the impact that the use of social media has on collecting knowledge about competitors, adapting to customers, and sales performance is considered. Accordingly, a broad literature review is provided to introduce extant theory contributing to the proposed model. The practical uses of social media by salespeople will be described, and then the theoretical foundation is built, encompassing social media use, goal orientations, and adaptive selling theory. Results of an empirical model are provided, followed by a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.
•Findings of the study suggest that social media is one way to enhance sales performance, but its use alone does not guarantee such enhancement.•Social media use will affect performance of salespeople through affecting their competitive intelligence collection and adaptive selling.•Perceived usefulness of social media was not significantly related to salesperson social media use.•Results support linking collection of competitive intelligence to a salesperson’s adaptive selling behavior.
Team selling and the increasing representation of women in the sales force are two current trends contributing to the complexity of managing the sales environment, yet little work exists ...investigating the impact of women on selling team performance. This paper anchors on cognitive resource diversity theory and integrates relevant prior research to propose a new proposition-driven framework that explains why gender diversity of team members improves team performance. Specifically, we provide evidence to suggest that the addition of females to all-male selling teams should positively impact team performance by reducing the average turnover rate of high performers within the team; by enhancing relational skills, organizational citizenship behaviors, and shared leadership within the team; and by building on the favorable effects associated with team heterogeneity. We also consider the moderating effects that potentially deeply ingrained connections among members of all-male teams may have on changes in team gender composition, as well as the importance of a culture of organizational inclusion on the favorable effects of team heterogeneity overall. Managerial implications of increased female presence on teams are proffered, along with suggested next steps in research and limitations of the present conceptualization.
•A proposition-driven framework is proposed for mixed-gender team performance.•Increased presence of females affords several routes to increased team performance.•Average turnover rate of high performers should be reduced.•Enhanced relational skills, organizational citizenship behaviors, and shared leadership should benefit the team.•Favorable direct effects of team heterogeneity also should enrich team performance.
This research is among the first to examine salespeople's acceptance of AI (artificial intelligence) and we investigate the drivers of their AI acceptance from the perspective of the managers. In ...this study, we propose and empirically demonstrate that perceived ease of use, self-efficacy, perceived management support, and digitalization are positively related to salespeople's acceptance of AI. Moreover, we show that digitalization mediates the relationship between salespeople's prospecting/adaptive selling capabilities and their AI acceptance. The results suggest that in order to incentivize AI acceptance, managers need to build adequate digital infrastructure, cultivate organizational support to encourage AI adoption and usage, provide professional training to educate salespeople on the proper usage of AI, and reduce salespeople's perceived risk of AI usage. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed subsequently.
"For more than two decades, Consultative Selling™ has enabled sales professionals around the world to achieve unprecedented success by helping their clients make more profitable business decisions. ...The Seventh Edition gives you the tools to continue bringing superior results to 21st Century organizations—and take your own career to a new level.
Despite the extensive research on channel governance and inter-firm relationships over the last decades, the literature offers limited insights into the sharing of functions between suppliers and ...their distributors. This issue has gained particular relevance in recent years, as both suppliers and distributors have sought to adapt to increasingly competitive environments by changing their revenue-generation models to focus more on servitization while providing customer solutions. This paper adopts the distributor's perspective to investigate how supplier involvement in selling functions to sell to the distributor's customers impacts the distributor's financial performance. Focusing on a sample of industrial resellers for whom non-product revenues represent an important share of their overall revenues associated with selling a supplier's product line, this paper demonstrates that supplier involvement negatively impacts distributor financial performance—an effect that is moderated by distributor solution-selling capabilities and environmental uncertainty.
•Supplier involvement in selling functions to sell to the distributor's customers negatively impacts distributor performance•The negative effect of supplier involvement on distributor performance is attenuated for higher levels of distributor solution selling capabilities and environmental uncertainty•Supplier and distributor solution selling capabilities are main drivers of supplier involvement•Supplier solution selling capabilities have a positive effect on distributor performance
Find a method to evaluate stocks- and build a record of impressive returns Short Selling for the Long Term describes the methods used by Joseph Parnes, President of Technomart, to obtain consistent ...returns in the stock market. Most investors fail to exceed the returns represented by the Standard and Poor's Stock Index, but Parnes often does using his investment philosophy. This book outlines his method of stock assessment, providing an understandable formula. If the formula tells a reader to buy a stock, then, as explained, there is a significant chance that stock will go up. If the formula tells a reader to short a stock, then the book shows how there is a significant chance that the stock will go down. Parnes advocates the use of short selling as a long-term strategy in combination with long positions, so advisors and individual investors alike can profit in both rising and falling markets. While most investing books focus on how to make money over the long term in a rising markets, Parnes's focus on short selling as a way of capturing volatility sets this book apart from the crowd. He offers insights into the difference between option trading and shorting which make his system useful in both type of markets. Profit in a bear market Borrow the stock you want to bet against Sell borrowed shares Learn the secrets of long-term short selling strategy Buy shares back and close by delivering at the new, lower price Short Selling for the Long Term is essential reading for investment advisors, fund managers, and individual investors.
The increased usage and proliferation of businesses entering the gig economy has meant more employment options for individuals wishing to participate in the gig economy. However, not all gig ...employment opportunities are the same. Typically, gig employment opportunities fall into one of two categories: the sharing economy or direct selling. These two types of gig employment are unique in the perceptions of those that choose to engage in them. This research seeks to provide insights into the drivers of gig worker perceptions of the product, organizational trust, job outcome status and satisfaction. Results suggest that direct sales workers have higher levels of self-congruence, and lower levels of perceived commerciality, leading to positive evaluations of the product offered, organizational trust and job satisfaction. Conversely, sharing economy workers have much lower levels of self-congruence, and higher levels of perceived commerciality, leading to a more complicated relationship with the outcome variables.
Even as salespeople increasingly adopt social media, sales research and practice struggle to understand how their application can help salespeople acquire customers. This article therefore explores ...empirically under which conditions social media adoption enhances or impedes the customer acquisition performance of salespeople. According to motivation literature, the outcomes of salespeople's social media adoption should depend fundamentally on the interplay of the level and direction of social media adoption. Based on a multi-level data set containing objective performance data and surveys of salespeople, the results of this study reveal that salespeople's social media adoption increases customer acquisition performance if salespeople communicate in a customized way (indicated by customer orientation). Strikingly, the study also unveils that this effect is negative if salespeople communicate in a standardized way (indicated by, for example, performance orientation). These findings in turn offer several managerial and theoretical implications.
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2022.2033624 .
