A Parsimonious Instrument for Predicting Students’ Intent to Pursue a Sales Career: Scale Development and Validation

Students’ desire and intention to pursue a career in sales continue to lag behind industry demand for sales professionals. This article develops and validates a reliable and parsimonious scale for measuring and predicting student intention to pursue a selling career. The instrument advances previous scales in three ways. The instrument is generalizable across academic settings and is shown to be sensitive to differences across varied course coverage and learning activities. The instrument is parsimonious and offers a high reliability coefficient. Finally, the instrument is validated both before and after exposure to a sales module, thus capturing perceptual and attitudinal changes as students become more familiar with this career option

Evaluating Educational Practices for Positively Affecting Student Perceptions of a Sales Career

Despite demand for new graduates seeking a sales position, student reticence toward pursuing a sales career remains. While all students will not choose a sales career, diminishing the existence of sales-related misconceptions among the student population should establish sales as a viable career path for a larger number of students. We test six educational interventions in large Principle of Marketing classes from three different universities (n = 1,355) to help identify educational practices for reducing student reticence toward a career in sales. Our results show that while all six educational approaches raise students’ perceptions and interest in a selling career, the utilization of experienced salespeople to present classroom materials and to discuss their sales career was the most effective. Classroom lecture and role-plays by university sales students had the second highest intent to pursue intervention scores. We offer recommendations for how to best present sales material to these large, lecture-based courses

Online Shopper Motivations, and e-Store Attributes: An Examination of Online Patronage Behavior and Shopper Typologies.

e-Stores and online shopping have become important aspects of a retailer’s strategy. Previous research suggests that online shoppers are fundamentally different from traditional offline shoppers. However, based on the Big Middle Theory (Levy et al. 2005), the authors believe that there are segments of online shoppers that are very similar to regular shopper groups. To determine this, online shopping motivations and e-store attribute importance measures are separately used as the basis to develop online shopper typologies. Results reveal that there are more similarities than differences among traditional and online store shoppers. However, there are a few unique shopper types present at online stores, attracted by the distinctive characteristics and attributes of the online retail environment. The findings offer interesting implications for online retail strategy

The Social Buyer: A Framework for the Dynamic Role of Social Media in Organizational Buying

Social media plays a central role in information and knowledge management to support business-to-business (B2B) buying decisions. To date, research has yet to delineate the mechanisms through which social media information relates to B2B buying and subsequent organizational outcomes. To describe this process, we build on social media\u27s ability to facilitate conveyance and convergence processes within the buying unit enabling knowledge discovery, knowledge sharing, and knowledge interpretation. Based on an organizational knowledge framework, we derive propositions about the role of social media in B2B buying and delineate boundary conditions for its influence within the B2B buying unit and the organization. This research sets the foundation for future empirical work at the intersection of B2B and social media

Information Technology, Learning, and Sales Performance

Although organizations strive to improve performance of their employees by encouraging them to exploit what they have learnt (exploitative learning) and explore new knowledge (exploratory learning), scant research examines how organizations can enable employees with information technology (IT) to help them leverage exploitative and exploratory learning for improved employee performance. This study examines the role of employee-focused IT-enablement and customer-focused IT-enablement in helping employees leverage exploitative and exploratory learning to improve their performance. We theorize that employee-focused IT enablement positively moderates the effect of exploitative learning on employee performance, whereas customer-focused IT enablement positively moderates the effect of exploratory learning on employee performance. Empirical analysis of a multi-sourced matched-pair dataset gathered from 181 salespersons and their managers in a biotechnology medical devices company supports our theory. This study uncovers differential moderating effects of employee-focused and customer-focused IT enablement on the influence of exploitative and exploratory learning on individual employee performance