Selling and Sales Management in Action: Prospecting: A New Look at this Old Challenge

Prospecting is a fundamental step in the personal selling process. However, a wide variety of prospecting approaches exists among sales organizations and there is substantial disagreement in the terms used to describe prospecting elements and relationships. This article presents a working model that identifies and defines those elements and clearly demonstrates the strategic relationships among them. Insights and implications for managers are presented, along with suggestions for analyzing and modifying existing prospect-development programs.     

Personal Selling & Sales Management Abstracts

It has been suggested that delivering superior service quality is a prerequisite for success in today's business environment. As a boundary spanner, the industrial salesperson plays a critical role in the service delivery process. However, little sales force research has focused on service quality. This article focuses on the link between personal selling and service quality, and demonstrates how one firm utilized a measure of service quality as a diagnostic tool in managing its sale force. Additionally, the article shows how the same firm used a competitive service quality assessment to gain insights into its competitive position.     

Personal Selling & Sales Management Abstracts

Today, many suppliers utilize relationship selling as an increasingly important element of their marketing strategy. The goal of the relationship selling effort is to earn the position of “preferred supplier” by developing trust in key accounts over a period of time. Relationship selling requires the learning of new skills particularly in the areas of understanding customer needs and relationship development. Coaching strategies and programs developed for teaching transactional selling skills—probing, handling objections and closing—are antiquated and in some instances dysfunctional. Coaching must now teach a new way of thinking about selling and managing. This article draws on 10 years of consulting experience in large and small corporations in North America and Europe and describes a new approach—Insight Coaching—an action oriented teaching strategy to help salespeople build trust in their key accounts.     

Selling & Sales Management in Action: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF INCENTIVES IN A SALES FORCE CONTEST

The sales job of the early twenty-first century has evolved due to myriad rapidly changing environmental factors. Customer relationship focus, technology, global competition, shifting customer preferences and demands, forced downsizing, increased competitive pressure, and other factors have contributed to altering the salesperson role—what salespeople do. Yet outdated taxonomies are referenced when researching and writing about sales jobs. This paper develops an empirically generated sales position taxonomy based on changing selling activities and strategies. First, a set of 105 activities are factor analyzed to create 12 dimensions of selling. Second, the factor scores are entered into a cluster analysis. The resulting factor score centroids allow for interpretation of a taxonomy of six categories of contemporary sales jobs.     

Selling & Sales Management in Action: The Importance of Various Motivational Factors to College Students Interested in Sales Positions

Sales professionals in the computer industry have had to confront a fundamental shift in the definition and source of value within their marketplace. From an emphasis on hardware, vendors and customers are now looking to software and systems for the next advancements in technology and productivity. As the sources of value within the industry have changed, so have the requirements for sales success. No longer able to rely on their traditional and “proven” approach to selling, salespeople have had to learn new competencies. Based on studies of the sales organizations of six computer companies, this article explores how—and why—computer salespeople must adopt a new sales orientation and expand their behavioral repertoire.     

Selling & Sales Management in Action: Using the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management As A Teaching Aid

Abstract

Although much marketing literature exists pertaining to whether products should be marketed differently from services, little attention has focused on whether product selling differs from service selling. This article reports the results of an empirical investigation that examined whether salespeople selling industrial products use different selling techniques than those selling services. The results suggest that product sales personnel prefer techniques that can use tangible aspects of the product to advantage, while service sales personnel prefer techniques that stress the personal assistance of customers. The implications of the results are also presented.     

Selling and Sales Management in Action: Sales Training: Status and Needs

Initial training, continuing education and management development activities continue to receive attention in the industrial sector (Honeycutt and Ford 1991). For example, recent reports indicate that organizations spend upwards of $30 billion annually for training programs involving 15 billion work hours (Huber 1985), with the objective being to improve the profitability of the firms.     

Selling and Sales Management in Action: Managerial and Legal Implications of Price Haggling: A Sales Manager's Dilemma

Conventional marketing wisdom suggests that once an organization has carefully selected the target market and positioning of its offering, the price strategy is relatively straightforward. However, with the increasing power of the buyer brought about by the proliferation of offerings, domestic and international, the consolidation of distribution channels, the slowing of market growth as well as legislation contribute to a far from straightforward implementation of the pricing policy. To this end, the authors will examine the managerial and legal implications of haggling over price which the sales manager will face regarding “one-price” and “variable-price” policies, and the effect of these policies on the buying process.

Price haggling has not enjoyed the same tradition in the United States as it has in many overseas markets. Until the end of retail price maintenance in 1975, in most cases the ticket price was the price to be paid. U.S. buyers consider themselves shrewd shoppers, but this shrewdness arises from shopping around, rather than from price negotiation. Indeed, one of the few exposures to price haggling in the United States is experienced while shopping at the car dealership. However, price negotiation is becoming far more common, particularly in business-to-business purchases. The problem, however, is how to administer the proper pricing strategy without alienating customers or violating the law.     

Index to Volume 26 of Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

Organizational support theory is used to investigate the moderating effects of both instrumental and social/psychological support on the relationships between a salesperson’s customer orientation and level of psychological empowerment and job performance. Results obtained within a sampling of 830 financial services salespeople operating from remote locations indicate that organizational support may interfere with salespeople’s attitudes in the development of salesperson performance. Specifically, this study found that under conditions of low social/psychological support the positive effect of empowerment on job performance becomes weaker, but the positive effect of customer orientation on job performance becomes significantly stronger. Further, instrumental support seems to be somewhat counterproductive to high-performing salespeople by diminishing the positive relationship between empowerment and performance. Implications of such findings are discussed.     

Index to Volume 25 of Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

Job burnout has been described as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a feeling of reduced personal accomplishment that frequently occurs among individuals who do client-centered work of some kind such as selling. Burnout is a particularly troubling condition as it has been related to a host of organizational problems ranging from increased turnover to decreased job satisfaction and performance. Burnout has been well documented and studied in several client-centered positions such as nursing and teaching, but it has received little attention in the sales literature. This paper builds on previous research by shedding light on the sequential steps in the burnout process in personal selling while empirically testing a model of burnout in the professional selling position.     

Selling and Sales Management in Action: Attitudes and Applications of Quotas by Sales Executives and Sales Managers

A survey of 186 sales managers and executives revealed that in setting sales quotas, factors such as the sales territory and the support provided by the manager were considered more important than the past performance of the sales representative. As would be expected, in an inspection of general opinions about sales quotas, the managers demonstrated a preference for linking the sales quota to the compensation of the salesperson.     

Index to Volume 22 of Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

A considerable amount of research has focused on stress in personal selling, primarily focusing on role demands. However, the issue of how a salesperson’s sales behaviors relate to his or her own stress has largely been unaddressed. The author investigates felt stress in the salesperson as a consequence of using coercive sales tactics. The role of learning orientation as a coping resource is also examined. It was found that the use of coercive sales tactics (threats and promises) is associated with higher levels of felt stress. This stress, in turn, is related to lower levels of manifest influence. Learning orientation serves as a coping resource, moderating the relationship between threats and felt stress.     

Selling and Sales Management in Action: The Role of Strategic Selling in the Company Turnaround Process

Despite the importance of marketing orientation to company profile and performance as presented in the literature, there has been little attention paid to the role of strategic selling in the company turnaround process in published studies. This article explores selling's contribution to company turnaround through a study of ailing and rejuvenated companies in the mature engineering industry. The development and implementation of sales strategies in successfully turned around and failed companies are compared. The role of strategic selling is broadened as new concepts are developed and explored.     

Selling and Sales Management in Action: The Sales Force's Role in International Marketing Research and Marketing Information Systems

Many companies resist global markets because of seemingly insurmountable problems with these markets. Salespeople are often used successfully to gather market information. There is a wealth of market data that can be collected by a company's international sales force and distributors' sales force which can prove to be valuable in surmounting cultural and marketing barriers associated with global markets. The current paper discusses how and with what success U.S. multinational companies are using their international sales forces in gathering international marketing research data.     

Leaders in Selling and Sales Management

Little empirical research has been reported on multinational sales force management, and none on organizational aspects. Reported here are results from a 14 MNC-135 subsidiary survey of overseas sales management practices. They show that MNCs use independent sales organizations to augment company personnel in affluent markets, in physically-large countries, and where markets are geographically-dispersed or culturally-fragmented. In addition, about one sales force in five covers more than one national market. Industry factors are important in the structuring of sales forces, suggesting that industry practices are carried into overseas markets.     

Leaders in Selling and Sales Management: Lee A. Iacocca

Solid product knowledge and an absolute love for selling have propelled Lee A. Iacocca into the business-world spotlight. Although detractors may criticize some of his corporate management skills, and he personally admits to his share of mistakes (Ingrassia & Stertz 1990), few can doubt the selling and sales management skills of Iacocca. Although much has been written about Iacocca, this article will focus on his specific contributions to the sales discipline.     

Word and Person Effects on Decoding Accuracy: A New Look at an Old Question

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on decoding by bringing together two lines of research, namely person and word factors that affect decoding, using a crossed random-effects model. The sample was comprised of 196 English-speaking grade 1 students. A researcher-developed pseudoword list was used as the primary outcome measure. Because grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) knowledge was treated as person and word specific, we are able to conclude that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a student to know all GPCs in a word before accurately decoding the word. And controlling for word-specific GPC knowledge, students with lower phonemic awareness and slower rapid naming skill have lower predicted probabilities of correct decoding than counterparts with superior skills. By assessing a person-by-word interaction, we found that students with lower phonemic awareness have more difficulty applying knowledge of complex vowel graphemes compared to complex consonant graphemes when decoding unfamiliar words. Implications of the methodology and results are discussed in light of future research.