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This paper aims to describe key issues at macro and micro levels which impact – and affect – sales training activities and facilitation for “successful selling” in the contemporary economic climate.

This paper reports presentations from key speakers at the Institute of Sales & Marketing's Successful Selling conference.

At the macro level, a number of crises are impacting on the economy and, thus, successful selling. However, there is still the opportunity to compete for market share, via brand differentiation. At the micro level, customers must see sellers as “trusted advisors”; successful selling depends on “connecting” with customers' values; ethical selling is important not just in helping people to be successful salespeople but also in helping society to have confidence in its sales professionals, thus enabling buyers to buy with confidence; traditional sales models are becoming superseded by “internet research, internal discussion and the preparation of shortlists, then a decision followed by contacting the vendor”. “E‐selling” is becoming increasingly important, so sellers must have personal branding, create an internet footprint, and engage with social media.

This paper reveals key issues in sales so L&D professionals can commission, develop, deliver and/or facilitate appropriate activities and resources to develop the sales skills needed for success in the next ten years.

Armed with knowledge of the modern trends in successful selling, L&D professionals can source and resource sales‐related training activities to turn their salespeople into star performers in contemporary markets and enable their organisations to maintain/increase their competitive advantage.

Based on the literature of IT strategic alignment and e-collaboration, the purpose of this paper is to specify how e-business strategic alignment (e-alignment) influences e-collaboration capabilities and improves firm performance, and whether the time-lag effect existed in this relationship.

The authors tested the research hypotheses using a field survey of 145 Chinese corporations. The research model was validated using SmartPLS 2.0 with both subjective and objective data collected from the survey and Oriana database.

The results support the notion of a positive and significant link between e-alignment and e-collaboration capabilities and between e-collaboration capabilities and firm performance. The authors also show that the effect of e-alignment on performance is fully mediated by e-collaboration capabilities and that e-collaboration with suppliers has a one-year time-lag effect on firm performance.

This research extends and integrates the literature on IT strategic alignment and e-collaboration, and explains why and how e-alignment generates firm performance.

This paper includes two implications for managers. First, when formulating e-business strategies, managers should focus on establishing e-collaboration capabilities with partners. Second, the downstream process is the direct sources of business value. Managers should take the establishment of e-selling process as a critical business strategy.

By focussed on intermediate factors and time-lag effects, this study provides significant implications for IT strategic alignment and e-collaboration literature.

Integrating relationship marketing and management research, the author explores internal selling (i.e., a salesperson’s internally focused efforts intended to identify, solicit, and use internal sales resources to support external selling activities) as a unique source of salespeople role stress and examine its contingent outcomes. The conceptual model suggests that internal selling as a job demand and stressor leads to increased salespeople role stress. However, a number of situational (i.e., selling organization market orientation, service climate, and seller–buyer relationship) and individual factors (i.e., networking ability and psychological capital of the salespeople) serve as job and personal resources to moderate the internal selling–outcome relationships, such that when such resources are adequate, internal selling will reduce role stress and increase sales performance. The author also examines situational (i.e., customer solutions offering and formalization of the selling organization) and individual (i.e., salespeople power and social status) antecedents of internal selling. The model provides useful insights and practical guidance for selling organizations to recognize mechanisms associated with internal selling in their organizations, and to intentionally design within organization support systems to enhance salespeople well being and enable them to participate effectively in the relational process of selling. The chapter stresses the need to develop context-specific stress models for different occupations and job roles.

This study aims to develop and test a model of relationship selling management. It seeks to examine the impact of leadership quality and relationship selling, as antecedents of salespeople's relational behaviours, on sales effectiveness.

Starting from a review of literature, the model incorporates two classes of salespeople's relational behaviours, namely customer‐oriented selling (COS) and adaptive selling (AS), two classes of managerial antecedents (i.e. relationship selling strategy and LMX) and one consequence (sales effectiveness). The authors collected data from 164 sales manager‐salesperson dyads in a sample of French firms. A structural equation modelling approach was employed to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that relationship selling and LMX stimulate salespeople's relational behaviours, which in turn positively affect sales effectiveness. Moreover, the results reveal a positive impact of relationship selling on sales manager‐salesperson exchanges.

The study is cross‐sectional, and many other relevant constructs should be investigated in future research on the topic. Objective measures of performance may also be incorporated.

The study demonstrates that companies can stimulate desirable behaviours of salespeople, which drive to better performance, by leveraging on controllable organisational factors, i.e. selling strategy and leadership.

The research fills three important gaps in the extant literature. First of all, the study clearly sheds some light on the role played by specific organisational variables (e.g. leader‐member exchange quality) and behaviours of salespeople in implementing relational strategies. Second, the study shows that the quality of the relationship between supervisors and salespeople can affect specific behaviours of subordinates. Third, the paper contributes to a better understanding of organisational drivers of customer‐oriented selling and adaptive selling, and finds evidence of a positive impact of such behaviours on sales effectiveness.

Dual marketing, i.e. selling the same product to both consumers and business customers, calls for a rearrangement of companies’ organizational chart. New figures, appointed with new roles, need to be integrated within the organization. In addition, dual marketers are required new skills by the market, having to learn to blend push and pull marketing techniques. This chapter discusses how the market's imperatives make the dual marketer an on-the-edge figure within the business landscape, able to constantly reinvent herself to keep pace with innovations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of negative performance feedback on firms' cost behaviors including productive behaviors (i.e. R&D behaviors) and non-productive behaviors (i.e. selling behaviors and business entertainment behaviors), as well as to investigate the roles of ownership types and marketization.

A sample of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2007 to 2018 is analyzed employing multiple regression models.

The results show that negative performance feedback has a positive but not significant effect on R&D behaviors, while its effect on selling behaviors is significantly positive. Meanwhile, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between negative performance feedback and business entertainment behaviors. Furthermore, when facing a performance dilemma, state-owned enterprises tend to adjust selling behaviors, while nonstate-owned enterprises pay more attention to business entertainment behaviors. In terms of marketization, the firms in high-marketization regions are more likely to adjust their R&D, selling and business entertainment behaviors, while the firms in low-marketization regions are difficult to adjust these cost behaviors.

This study explores the role of negative performance feedback in firms' cost behaviors and provides empirical evidence about the differentiated influences regarding ownership types and marketization.

Integrating insights from existing studies and introducing the behavioral theory of the firm and prospect theory, this study proposes a more inclusive framework that addresses the impacts of negative performance feedback on firms' cost behaviors. This paper deepens the understanding of firms' decision behaviors in the dilemma of performance shortfall.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the core determinants and adoption patterns of the major enterprise information systems.

This study incorporated the core representative and meaningful explanatory variables in the major previous literatures and analyzes the core determinants of businesses' adoption of the essential information systems and the substitutionary patterns among them, using a Bayesian multivariate probit model, which is based on McFadden's random utility model and capable of handling multiple response data.

It was found that not only factors from the classical technological diffusion viewpoint but also factors such as organizational tools and strategic behaviors play an important role in firms' adoption of information systems. Specifically, epidemic effect generally outweighs size effect, and putting more effort into the intensity of information strategy planning is more influential than the hiring of a professional chief information officer. On the other hand, such variables as age of the firm, labor intensity, and number of PCs per person generally have no significant impacts. Finally, a relatively strong complementary relationship exists between enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management adoption, and between e‐buy and groupware adoption.

The results presented in this paper have important implications for firms on a minimal budget that want to maximize their productivity through the adoption of information systems. They also provide important information for government policymakers whose job it is to design strategies for the successful deployment of information systems.

This paper aims to develop and test a method of automating, for online retailers, the practice of adaptive selling, which is typically used by salespeople in face-to-face interactions. This method customizes persuasive messages for individual customers as they navigate a retailer’s website.

This paper demonstrates a method for the online implementation of automated adaptive selling using sales influence tactics. Automated adaptive selling is compared to nonadaptive selling in three e-commerce field studies.

The results reveal that adaptive selling is more effective than nonadaptive selling. The click-through rates increased significantly when adaptive selling was used.

This paper highlights the effectiveness of existing theories concerning adaptive human-to-human selling and their utility to online selling. The authors demonstrate the added value of adaptive selling in e-commerce, thereby opening up a novel area of research into adaptive selling online. While the paper focuses on the adjustment of sales influence tactics, other factors could be investigated for adjustment in future research (e.g. prices).

The methods, described in detail, are readily available for implementation by online retailers. The implementations are timely and increasingly valuable as e-commerce expands into interpersonal channels (e.g. instant messengers and social media).

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to formally implement automated adaptive selling as described in the ISTEA model in an e-commerce setting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of trades by informed traders and uninformed traders on the asymmetric volatility relation, a stylized fact that has long been puzzling financial economists. Avramov, Chordia, and Goyal's hypothesized that asymmetric volatility, defined as the negative relationship between daily volatility and lagged unexpected return, is governed by the trading dynamics of informed traders and uninformed traders. However, the hypothesis has not been directly tested due to lack of a measure for informed and informed trades. The authors aim to test the hypothesis using a direct measure for informed trades and uninformed trades.

The authors employ the Computer Trade Reconstruction (CTR) data of Nasdaq‐100 index futures for the period of 2002 through 2004. The dataset contains a unique variable distinguishing informed trades and uninformed trades, allowing the authors to directly examine the impact of the trades (i.e. selling activities) on the asymmetric volatility relation.

Based on the Nasdaq‐100 index futures data, the asymmetric volatility relation is driven by the selling activity of uninformed traders, particularly from small‐size trades. These results are only significant during the first half of the period, which is more volatile than the second half. The selling impact of informed traders on the asymmetric volatility relation is at most weak for both subperiods.

While risk and returns are important for asset pricing and risk management, most financial researchers consider them from a fundamental perspective. This paper's results suggest that selling activity of uninformed traders can significantly influence asset return and volatility and, hence, deserves more attention from the researchers.

The paper is the first to provide a direct test for Avmarov et al.'s hypothesis and shows that uninformed trades cause the asymmetric volatility. The authors contribute to ongoing discussions of how noise trading behavior can impact asset return and volatility.

International trade shows have become a significant promotional tool for exporters. However, little academic research has been used to examine the role of trade shows within marketing. Reviews the extant literature and develops a new framework of trade show participation modes (i.e. exhibitors and visitors) and motives (i.e. selling and buying). Notes that the two perspectives of buying exhibitors and selling visitors have not been discussed in the literature. Applies the framework to an empirical study of Norwegian seafood exporters participating at international trade shows. Finds significant differences in firm characteristics, participation motives and effectiveness between different participation modes and motives. Develops managerial implications and directions for future research.