Search results

If any organization wants to be globally recognized leadership plays an important role. This chapter deals with the leadership failure in creating good salesperson behavior in India’s pharmaceutical industry. There are four types of salesperson’s behavior: selling orientation, customer orientation, adaptive selling, and unethical selling. Selling oriented and unethical selling behaviors negatively impact customer trust and customer value, while customer orientation and adaptive are more positive. This chapter explores how senior managers can create good organization culture and organization climate by creating positive sales behavior. This chapter will be an eye opener to many first-line managers for helping their salespersons to practice customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior.

Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.

Prior research has documented a generally positive relationship between employees’ standing on constructs that are commonly studied by positive psychologists and workplace outcomes, such as job performance and retention. Constructs such as adaptability, empowerment, hope, optimism, and resilience are believed to reflect psychological resources that employees can draw upon when facing adversity and challenges in their work, while also reflecting a general tendency or disposition to experience positive emotions and engage with others in ways that reflect such positive emotions. As such, positive psychology constructs may be particularly important for performance in jobs characterized by high levels of social interaction, stress, and challenge. In order to explore the manner in which different positive psychology constructs are related to sales performance, this chapter presents findings from a meta-analytic investigation into the relationships between sales performance and a variety of positive psychology constructs. Findings based on data from 59 unique samples and 14,334 salespeople indicate that some positive psychology constructs exhibit moderate to even strong relationships with the performance of salespeople, although the strength of these relationships appears to have been substantially inflated by common-source bias. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for selection and training within sales occupations, and advance an agenda for future research.

In an increasingly technology-driven retail landscape, retailers face the challenge of making the most effective decisions regarding the selection and use of innovative technology. Although previous research provides insights into the added value of technology, it does not directly guide retailers in overviewing and selecting technology that supports their sales operations. This chapter contributes to the field of retail technology studies by introducing a sales-oriented model intended to assist retailers in inventorying available technologies and making decisions regarding the selection and use of these technologies for their physical stores. The model uses an updated version of the seven steps of selling as a foundation and, in line with the resource life cycle, decision support system and self-service technology literature streams, proposes applying technology in such a way that it supports the stages of the retailer's sales process. This chapter concludes with a discussion of practical guidelines for applying the model.

A central finding in the relationship marketing/buying literature is that the thought and decision processes by both marketers and buyers include a series of branching, if-then, questions and answers. For example, will customer X accept a 7 percent price increase? The correct answer: acceptance depends on the changes in the other attributes on the table (i.e., in the bid proposal or product–service design). Consequently, from designing and evaluating bid-purchase proposals to evaluating the current state of the overall seller–buyer relationship, the perceived value of the level of any given attribute depends in part of the value perceived in the levels of several other attributes. Possibly, business-to-business decisions and outcomes may be understood best by constructing thick descriptions of the multiple contingency paths that marketers and buyers think about and sometimes enact when deciding. Chapter 10 reports the use of two “think aloud” methods to learn the contingency thoughts and decisions of marketers and buyers of industrial solvents. The main conclusions of the study: designing generalized “gatekeeping,” contingency, models of if-then decision paths can be achieved; these models are useful for constructing accurate behavioral theories of marketer–buyer relationships.

Although African markets have incorporated various selling practices originating from the West, there are still some selling practices that are indigenous to the African people and are widely practised by sellers across the continent. This chapter is an attempt at documenting those indigenous practices with the aim of providing managers, educators and policymakers of the continent with a reference document on what these indigenous selling practices are, how sellers invoke them in the course of transactions and the cultural values that guide these practices. Primary data were gathered from three countries representing western, eastern and southern Africa through observations, field surveys and in-depth and key informant interviews while literature was sourced for secondary data. The chapter identified street selling, haggling and credit-based selling as the major indigenous selling practices found among sellers in Africa. The cultural values that guide selling in the continent include respect, trustworthiness and kindness. The chapter displayed a framework to explain the subject matter and made some practical suggestions that are relevant for managers, educators and policymakers.

Competitiveness is an important personality trait that has been studied in various disciplines and has been shown to predict critical work outcomes at the individual level. Despite this, the role of competitiveness in groups and teams has received scant attention amongst organizational researchers. Aiming to promote future research on the role of competitiveness as both an adaptive and maladaptive trait – particularly in the context of work – the authors review competitiveness and its effects on individual and team stress and Well-Being, giving special attention to the processes of cohesion and conflict and situational moderators. The authors illustrate a dynamic multilevel model of individual and team difference factors, competitive processes, and individual and team outcomes to highlight competitiveness as a consequential occupational stressor. Furthermore, the authors discuss the feedback loops that inform the different factors, highlight important avenues for future research, and offer practical solutions for managers to reduce unhealthy competition.