Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers associated with the adoption and use of mobile sales force automation (SFA) systems from a salesperson’s perspective.

A qualitative investigation of two business-to-business companies was conducted. Data collected from ten semi-structured interviews with directors or sales managers were analyzed to understand the main barriers to SFA system adoption.

The study confirms the existence of three barriers (customer knowledge, quality of information and the characteristics of mobile devices) to a mobile SFA system use and identifies two additional barriers: lack of time and optimization issues.

The explorative nature of the study and the qualitative method employed limit the generalizability of the results. The propositions could be further validated and tested with a wider population.

Organizations wishing to speed the adoption of a mobile SFA system should evaluate the importance and significance of the five identified barriers to adoption, and plan how to overcome them. It is important for the providers of the mobile SFA systems to focus on developing systems that can exploit the different characteristics of each channel and, in parallel, overcome the inherent limitations of any single channel. The content of an SFA system should be customizable for each type of mobile device.

Ever increasing mobility has led to a rise in the use of smartphones and tablet PCs (tablets) in business and the consequent growth in the use of SFA systems. Although SFA systems have been studied for roughly 30 years, little is known of the impact of newly developed mobile devices on sales management and sales personnel.

A strong and repeating theme in sales force automation (SFA) tool research is perceived usefulness. When salespeople perceived high levels of SFA tool usefulness, they report higher intent and actual use. The authors aim to apply agency theory to the concept of perceived usefulness (from the technology acceptance model) to explain why salespeople adopt some forms of SFA and reject still others. A set of hypotheses are proposed and tested revealing that salespeople will decide to use a SFA tool because they perceive it to be useful to themselves (i.e. PU_sp) and to their management (PU_sm).

Based on responses from 105 salespeople, the SFA tools they used were categorized as either outcome‐based (i.e. helping salespeople achieve their selling outcome goals) or activity‐based tools (i.e. helping management monitor selling activities/behaviors). Regression analyses were used to test six hypotheses relating salespeople's usage of each category of tools (the dependent variable) to the salesperson perceived usefulness constructs (both PU_sp and PU_sm – the independent variables).

The findings confirm that SFA tool use (either outcome‐based or activity‐based) is a function of both forms of perceived usefulness (i.e. PU_sp and PU_sm). Furthermore, when PU_sp is high, the salesperson is more likely to use outcome‐based (versus activity‐based) SFA tools over a longer period of time.

The paper validates agency theory as a useful paradigm for understanding salesperson SFA tool adoption. Salespeople will use SFA tools that they view as useful to their productivity and that the sales manager's influence over the salesperson's use of SFA tools may not be as important. To encourage use, firms need to emphasize how a SFA tool can meet salesperson needs.

The paper is the first to hypothesize and test the relationship between perceptions of SFA tool usefulness and actual usage by considering salesperson perception of usefulness to themselves (PU_sp) and perception of usefulness to their sales manager (PU_sm).

The purpose of this study is to reconcile the deterministic and the knowledge management approaches to investigate a framework that provides an explanation of the sales force automation (SFA) practices’ impact on salespersons’ performance through the organizational absorptive capacity in the African pharmaceutical industry.

An exploratory study was conducted to understand SFA uses in the pharmaceutical industry; then a total of 186 medical representatives were sampled and partial least squares analysis was performed.

The results identified the positive impact of organizational absorptive capacity on SFA use. In addition, the use of the SFA positively influenced the salespersons’ performance. Finally, age plays a positive moderating role in the relationships between use of SFA as a tool for internal coordination between actors and salespersons’ performance.

This research could be useful for managers of pharmaceutical laboratories to SFA use as a tool of coordination between the actors, as a tool of management of the customer relationship and as a tool of management knowledge.

In contrast with the existing studies dealing with deterministic approach when studying the use of SFA, this study exploited the reconciliation between deterministic and knowledge management approaches to propose a conceptual framework dealing with the relationship between the SFA use, the organizational absorptive capacity and the salespersons’ performance in the pharmaceutical industry. This research proposed and tested a framework adapted to the African context.

Sales force automation (SFA) is increasingly used to support customer relationships, and provides a good example of technology application on the supplier‐customer interface. While research has begun to examine SFA, understanding it from the customer viewpoint is still vague. This paper reports results of exploratory qualitative research to investigate perceptions of SFA among both salespeople and their customers in the insurance industry in Thailand. Results suggest that customers want technology to be integrated into interpersonal relationships, not to replace them. Most customers, even those with extensive IT background, are not willing to interact with technology‐based self service only. Much of the relationship with the company comes from trust in the salesperson, which is built up through the development of the relationship. This is probably more important in the relationship‐based cultures of Asia, which are strongly familiar with interpersonal service.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate and compare the efficiency of several water utilities using three frontier techniques. Moreover, this study estimates the impact of several qualities of service variables on water utilities’ performance.

The paper utilizes three frontier techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA), stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and stochastic non-parametric envelopment of data (StoNED) to estimate efficiency scores.

Efficiency scores for each methodological approach were different being on average, 0.745, 0.857 and 0.933 for SFA, DEA and StoNED methods, respectively. Moreover, it was evidenced that water leakage had a statistically significant impact on water utilities’ costs.

The choice of an adequate and robust method for benchmarking the efficiency of water utilities is very relevant for water regulators because it affects decision making process such as water tariffs and design incentives to improve the performance and quality of service of water utilities.

This paper evaluates and compares the performance of a sample of water utilities using three different frontier methods. It has been revealed that the choice of the efficiency assessment method matters. Unlike SFA and DEA, a lower variability was shown in the efficiency scores obtained from the StoNED method.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a performance evaluation framework using an integrated approach of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and technique of order preference with similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) called efficiency ranking method using SFA and TOPSIS (ERM-ST) specifically in the banking sector where service excellence is of prime importance for business growth.

The proposed approach ERM-ST measures the performance of a DMU in the SFA framework by considering multiple outputs and multiple inputs. It is a non-parametric tool which does not need any prior model assumptions which enhances its applicability in real-life business scenarios. Moreover, the efficiency score obtained using the proposed model ERM-ST lies between 0 and 1, unlike in case of super efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) which may go well above 1.

The proposed framework is evaluated for its applicability using two various data sets and is further used to evaluate the performance of a group of 26 public sector banks in India. The results obtained by the proposed method ERM-ST are compared with those obtained by super efficiency DEA using Friedman’s test.

The proposed approach ERM-ST is developed to evaluate the performance of a service unit with multiple outputs and multiple inputs in the SFA framework.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the importance of financial liquidity and solvency on US commercial and domestic banks’ cost efficiency while accounting for internal and external factors.

The Stochastic Frontier Analysis and Data Envelopment Analysis estimators are used to estimate the cost efficiency of 11,044  US commercial and domestic banks from 2005 to 2017. Using Tobit regression model, the importance of financial liquidity and solvency on cost efficiency is examined.

The results provide evidence that the financial liquidity and solvency negatively impact the cost efficiency of US commercial and domestic banks. Overall, US commercial and domestic banks were inefficient during the financial crisis in comparison to the tranquil period. The importance of financial solvency on the cost efficiency was not statistically significant, while the financial liquidity negatively collapsed because of contagion. Finally, the results provide evidence that the amount of total assets matters in the improvement of the cost efficiency.

This paper estimates and identifies the 2007-2009 financial crisis with liquidity, solvency or both financial factors.

This paper examines how perceptions about salesforce automation (SFA) systems are influenced by the perceived accuracy of the information the system provides.

Three hypotheses are tested. They are as follows. Sales people who perceive that the information is inaccurate will be less likely to: have a positive perception of the system; think that their training was helpful; and think that the system improves their productivity. Chi‐square tests are used to test the association between the perceptions of information accuracy and the statements in the hypotheses.

Negative perceptions about the accuracy of information leads to negative perceptions about other aspects of the SFA system.

This study examines the results for only one particular organization. The results may not be generalizable to other organizations. As similar data about other SFA systems become available, this study can be used as a basis for examining the effect of information accuracy on perceptions of SFA systems.

Since the company has some control over the accuracy of the information provided by the system, they should attempt to provide information that the salesforce finds useful. To enure that the proper information is provided, management must seek the user's input about what information should be provided. Additionally, the data should be cleansed and provide an indicator of the probability that a particular lead will result in a sale.

This paper aims to examine alternative methods for recording and treating costs in studies of bank efficiency.

This study used stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) models with core costs and total costs to estimate the cost efficiency of banks in two different economies, Vietnam where the banking system is under-developed (and thus is dominated by traditional banking activities) and New Zealand where the banking system is well-developed (and thus non-traditional banking activities play an important role).

The authors found that models using total cost tend to underestimate the banks’ cost efficiency. This underestimation relates to the extent of modern activities in a banking system: it is larger in an advanced banking system (i.e. New Zealand) and smaller in a less-developed banking system (i.e. Vietnam).

Research is limited to two countries, and it would be useful to apply the same technique to other data sets.

The paper suggests a new approach to cost SFA studies in banking.

The paper provides a much more searching analysis of costs in banking than has generally been seen in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine salespersons’ adoption and usage of mobile sales configuration tools (MSCT) and to identify areas for further development in this realm. Another objective is to offer a conceptualization of MSCT adoption.

For this purpose, a qualitative case study approach was selected as the research method to better understand acceptance of a mobile configuration tool used by business-to-business (B2B) salespersons. Primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews, which included a series of open-ended questions to gain more detailed and contextual data.

The results obtained from the interviews indicated several important determinants of adoption of sales configuration tools, and three different personal innovativeness types were identified.

The current study has certain limitations that should be considered in future studies. First, the results of this study cannot be generalized in other contexts because of small number of participants (nine salespersons) included. Second, social desirability might have affected the results in a way that caused the salespersons to have been tempted to talk positively about MSCT.

Based on the findings several suggestions for managers and software developers are made such as further technical development of MSCT, development of common sales routine for all salespersons, mentoring new salespersons and establishing social media channels for salesperson to interact with each, share experience/knowledge.

Current paper can serve as pathway toward understanding of MSCT adoption and usage as it opens new avenues as a source of hypotheses for a quantitative analysis of certain phenomena such as the correlation between MSCT usage and sales performance.