Drivers and outcomes of salespersons’ value opportunity recognition competence in solution selling

Abstract

In B2B markets, firms seek to provide customer solutions instead of merely selling goods or services. As boundary-spanners, salespeople are pivotal for implementing this strategic shift. Yet, extant literature provides limited insights into salesperson’s resources and competencies required for customer solutions, particularly in the early phases of solution selling. This research focuses on salesperson’s value opportunity recognition competence (VOR), which is a central requirement for salespeople to be able to navigate the early phases of solution selling. Analyzing large-scale, multi-level data of 799 salespeople and their respective sales managers in 29 sales organizations, the authors investigate the role of different salesperson resources and work environment characteristics for strengthening their VOR. The authors find that salespeople need both customer and technical knowledge, but customer knowledge is more important. Salespeople also can substitute individual technical knowledge with strong internal relations, but strong customer relations are no substitute for individual knowledge about customers’ business models and processes. Formalization turned out to be a double-edged sword in the context of VOR development, while transformational leadership has positive effects only. The findings bear concrete implications for improving the selection, training, and work environment of solution salespeople.     

The ascetic twist

Within the field of church history, this article is a study of a specific topic with regards to the Reformation period, namely, asceticism, from an uncommon perspective. One of the most well-known Reformation treatises, Martin Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, is read in conversation with an earlier ascetic writing, Maximus Confessor’s The Ascetic Life, and then compared to an understudied debate from the late sixteenth century between the Lutheran Tübingen theologians and the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah II. This textually-based study is concerned both with the methodological problems that characterize the politics of comparison and with the present debates surrounding asceticism. In the end, it is argued that asceticism is not only a historically valid topic of study in a Lutheran setting, but also theologically relevant. Based on a distinction between spiritual and physical exercise, I argue that there is a social dimension to be rediscovered if inner dimensions of “piety” are reconnected with embodied, visible and communal practices in the context of the counterculture that is the Christian church.