1,721,025 research outputs found
It is all in good humor? Examining the impact of salesperson evaluations of leader humor on salesperson job satisfaction and job stress
No full textSalesperson job stress and job satisfaction have been identified as critical factors affecting job performance. Academic research suggests that sales managers can influence salesperson job stress and job satisfaction. Interestingly, a review of the sales literature finds very little research on the impact of sales leader humor usage on the stress and satisfaction of salespeople. Consequently, we explore how salespeople’s evaluation of their manager’s use of humor influences their individual levels of job stress and satisfaction. We investigate both the positive and negative roles of humor by analyzing the impact of salesperson evaluations of their managers’ use of affiliative and aggressive humor on their job stress and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we examine the mechanism by which these evaluations affect salesperson stress and satisfaction by identifying two critical mediating variables–social loneliness and willingness to cooperate. Using a sample of 299 professional salespeople, we empirically test this process model to find that affiliative humor usage by sales managers, as evaluated by salespeople, reduces social loneliness and stress for salespeople while also increasing followers’ acceptance of cooperation. Evaluations of aggressive humor, on the other hand, increase stress levels among salespeople. Both social loneliness and acceptance of cooperation, in turn, significantly affect job satisfaction
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Understanding the enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textPurpose – The COVID-19 pandemic has led to major sales strategy and process changes as many interactions migrated from face-to-face to virtual
environments. The nature of the interactions changed, and sales firms, the sales function and salespeople created new processes to excel in virtual
environments. As sales processes evolve further, this paper aims to focus on understanding the enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes. In
addition, this study seeks to understand the characteristics of enduring shifts and how they are distinct from temporary shifts.
Design/methodology/approach – This qualitative analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the sales organizations and salespeople over the
period from the start of the pandemic to early 2022. The authors interviewed 66 sales professionals from different countries and industries to better
understand the temporary and enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes, adopting ad inductive and narrative approach.
Findings – There are four major findings. First, four key themes emerged: increased digitalization, resistance to digitalization, sales process changes
and sales organization transformation. Second, changes are classified as temporary, permanent and accelerated changes. Third, some proposed
changes were not supported. Finally, five findings were found that were not discussed in previous literature.
Originality/value – This paper finds distinctive findings that offer additional valuable insights that connect to and extend existing literature. These
include emerging themes, classification shifts, unsupported proposed changes and unique finding
B2B online sales pushes: whether, when, and why they enhance sales performance
No full textBusiness-to-business (B2B) sellers are increasingly transitioning to hybrid sales structures, by augmenting an in-person field sales force with a direct online channel. During this transition, sellers frequently experience a cold-start problem, wherein existing customers are either not acquainted with the online channel or unconvinced of its usefulness and are therefore reluctant to adopt it. To overcome the cold-start problem, B2B sellers are increasingly relying on online sales pushes, which are efforts to encourage salespeople to nudge customers to adopt the online channel for certain buying tasks. Yet, because salespeople may fear that the online channel adoption jeopardizes the very relationships that they painstakingly built, the salespeople's compliance with an online sales push remains unclear. To glean insight into this dilemma, we empirically investigate an online sales push's impact on salesperson effort (re)allocation and sales performance. Based on an econometric analysis of archival data from a B2B seller and a scenario-based experiment, we conclude that salespeople generally tend to comply with an online sales push because it frees up their time and allows them to pursue new selling opportunities that have the potential to increase their compensation. The results also indicate that following an online sales push, salespeople expend their effort based on a customer's online proclivity and potential prior to the push. Moreover, the effort expended varies over time and across communication channels. Additionally, the analysis reveals (a) asymmetric carryover and cross-channel effects of communication effort and sales performance and (b) asymmetric synergistic effects of communication effort on sales performance
Salespeople are from Mars, purchasers are from Venus : matching sales to purchasing
Full text linkThere is no business without sales and no sales without customers. The bridge that spans business‐to‐business (B2B) selling and their customers is termed a buyer‐seller relationship. The contemporary buyer‐seller environment presents salespeople with the challenge of finding ways to overcome the current ineffectiveness of many previously effective sales approaches. The effectiveness of many sales approaches has been questioned based on the ongoing paradigm shift in the purchasing domain.
Purchasing based changes have had, and are expected to continue to have a tremendous influence on the buying process. Yet, the different roles in buyer‐seller relationships are, in the Marketing and Sales domain, either studied from the buyer’s perspective or from the seller’s point of view. Buying organizations, however, are gradually shifting power to the purchasing function. For sales practitioners and sales researchers, this ongoing shift demands a study in the evolution of the purchasing function in order to improve their sales approaches.
This doctoral thesis analyzes the domain of Buyer‐Seller Relationships in B2B contexts, with an emphasis on Personal Selling and Sales Management. The objective of this dissertation is to obtain a better understanding of how changes in market conditions and advances in technology have empowered the B2B purchaser, thereby creating new challenges to the sales organization and sales function.
The first essay of this dissertation is based on an extensive review of the Buyer‐Seller literature and is a call to sales practitioners to pay more attention to the purchasing function and to develop sales strategies and sales approaches that cater to the customers’ purchasing function. The research contribution of the first essay is a presentation of a research grid for future sales research. This framework depicts avenues for future sales research that encompasses the important topics that are considered to be important for the Purchasing & Supply Management (PSM) and the Buyer‐Seller research domains. Based on findings from the first essay, the second essay entails how the sales side should first understand specific purchaser’s jargon, the strategic importance of their offer while looking through a purchaser’s lens, to then adapt the sales messaging based on particular knowledge needs by the purchaser. This results in a selling approach that further advances the curren versions of value‐based selling, and contributes to the sphere of salespeople who succeed by a better presentation of the competitive advantages of their offer related to future cost benefits and risk reduction.
Finally, the third essay matches existing sales strategies according to the purchasing maturity of the customers. The maturity of the customer’s purchasing department is defined by Reck and Long (1977) in four gradual steps of professionalism. This research essay draws on these steps by first identifying the purchasing department’s maturity level, followed by an examination of what sales strategies are best suited to match the specific needs associated with the four levels of purchasing maturity
Ready for a co-creative economy? Implications of customer engagement in value creation for high-contact and technology-based service interfaces
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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