If you’re in sales, don’t build relationships only with customers

Relationships inside the company help boost sales performance, write Willy Bolander and Cinthia Satornin

Is the customer king?

Sales and service staff need to consider and influence a portfolio of relationships, not only customers, write Willy Bolander, Christopher R. Plouffe, Joseph A. Cote and Bryan Hochstei

Journal of Marketing: Volume 79, Number 6, November 2015

Social Networks Within Sales Organizations: Their Development and Importance for Salesperson Performance Willy Bolander, Cinthia B. Satornino, Douglas E. Hughes, and Gerald R. Ferris Most sales training efforts are focused on external customer interactions and relationships, but this research shows that building powerful internal social networks can also significantly enhance sales performance.? Engaging Customers in Coproduction Processes: How Value-Enhancing and Intensity-Reducing Communication Strategies Mitigate the Negative Effects of Coproduction Intensity Till Haumann, Pascal Güntürkün, Laura Marie Schons, and Jan Wieseke The study offers a better understanding of the negative effects of coproduction intensity and new insights into how firms can effectively mitigate these effects by employing value-enhancing and intensity-reducing communication strategies. The Impact of Dynamic Presentation Format on Consumer Preferences for Hedonic Products and Services Anne L. Roggeveen, Dhruv Grewal, Claudia Townsend, and R. Krishna When products or services are presented in video rather than still images, consumers tend to prefer (and more highly value) hedonic options (i.e., options that are more about fun and less about functionality). Harmful Upward Line Extensions: Can the Launch of Premium Products Result in Competitive Disadvantages? Fabio Caldieraro, Ling-Jing Kao, and Marcus Cunha Jr. Upward line extensions aimed at matching a competing product’s attributes may lead consumers to reassess their perceptions of the brand and the attributes of products in the market, resulting in a loss of market share and profit for the extending firm. Innovation Sequences over Iterated Offerings: A Relative Innovation, Comfort, and Stimulation Framework of Consumer Responses Timothy B. Heath, Subimal Chatterjee, Suman Basuroy, Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, and Bruno Kocher For iterated products (e.g., games, cars, films, etc.), carefully sequencing major and minor innovations improves success. How Kinetic Property Shapes Novelty Perceptions Junghan Kim and Arun Lakshmanan The paper identifies a specific property of animation -- kinetic property (trajectory changes in motion-paths of visual elements) -- which, under certain conditions, enhances consumer judgments of product novelty

Managing New Salespeople\u27s Ethical Behaviors During Repetitive Failures: When Trying to Help Actually Hurts

Despite acknowledgment that performance failure among new salespeople is a prevalent issue for organizations, researchers do not fully understand the consequences of repetitive periods of failure on new salespeople’s unethical selling behaviors. Further, little is known about how a sales force’s reward structure and managerial attempts to intervene following failure affect new salespeople’s behavior. Combining an experiment with longitudinal growth models, we show that repetitive periods of failure increase unethical behaviors, and interventions intended to remind the salesperson to behave in the customer’s best interests attenuate this effect under a non-contingent reward structure. However, counter to managerial assumptions, under a contingent reward structure these customer-oriented interventions actually backfire by amplifying the original relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors. The results have potentially important managerial implications for those who manage new salespeople learning how to sell or during other failure-prone periods

Is Sales Competition A Good Motivator or a Bad Idea? The Underlying Mechanism of Threat Appraisals

The common logic for competition in sales organizations is simple: as salespeople compete with one another, the sales performance of the entire group should increase. Some prior research has supported this notion, while other studies suggested that competition may adversely affect employees. Our research finds both positions have merit, as a salesperson\u27s perceptions of a competitive psychological climate (CPC) increase sales performance and turnover intentions. To explain this countervailing effect, we turn to cognitive appraisal theory to demonstrate that salesperson appraisal of the environment motivates their behavior. Specifically, salesperson threat appraisals act as a mediator between CPC to performance and turnover, identifying an underlying mechanism and negative relationships for both. We further uncover learning orientation as a moderator of the competitive psychological climate – threat relationship, thus identifying a variable that enables the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks of utilizing competition in the sales force

Selling your network: how political skill builds social capital and enhances salesperson performance

Research suggests that political skill affects how salespeople build and leverage social capital. However, there are important questions left unanswered in this relationship. First, although it is linked to specific structural characteristics of networks, it is unclear how political skill affects the overall quality of one’s social network. Similarly, it is unclear if objective and subjective social network quality measurement approaches produce comparable results. Third, although theory positions political skill and social network quality as desirable personal and structural resources, it is unknown how these resources affect dyadic relationships between salespeople and clients. Finally, there is a need to assess how the dimensions of political skill differentially affect social network quality. To address these questions, we propose a new model of social network quality, examining how political skill influences social network quality and salesperson performance in a two-study investigation. We begin by predictively testing the unique contributions of objective and subjective social network quality in the relationship between political skill and sales magnitude one year later. We then extend these findings using dyadic salesperson and customer data to explore how political skill and social network quality predictively impact sales magnitude, sales frequency, and relationship performance

Hiring for sales success: The emerging importance of salesperson analytical skills

Several studies suggest that accelerating technology, increasing product complexity, and an expanding volume of information in the marketplace are changing sales roles, necessitating a review of the current sales skills required for success. Using mixed methods, we examine the skills required of contemporary B2B salespeople. First, we draw on unique data from 3.8 million LinkedIn job postings to examine which skills sales recruiters are seeking in new hires. Whilst confirming the importance of previously researched sales skills, this identified a sales skill largely disregarded by the extant literature: salesperson analytical skills. We triangulated these findings through interviews with 20 sales executives and developed a scale to measure this new analytical skills construct. Then, to test the scale's predictive and nomological validity, we used survey data from 251 business-to-business salespeople. Results reveal that salesperson analytical skills have both a direct and a moderating effect on sales performance across varying selling situations