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This article evaluates the effect of technostress due to implementation of sales technologies on sales professionals in terms of changes in job satisfaction and role stress and potential mitigation strategies including technostress inhibitors and job commitment.

The study utilizes a survey data collection from sales professionals in B2B consultative roles selling to business customers from construction, industrial supply and business service firms, including items that explore before and after factors around a customer relationship management implementation.

Technostress results in a decrease in job satisfaction and an increase in role stress of sales professionals. Job commitment moderates the decrease in job satisfaction, i.e. the higher the job commitment the less significant the decrease in job satisfaction.

Sales forces need to implement technostress inhibitors to help mitigate the effects of technostress in exacerbating other sales professional stressors. These inhibitors should be contextualized to the unique situation of the sales organization.

The study examines the dark side of sales technologies. Our research expands current understanding by considering new relations among technostress-creating conditions and two work-related outcomes that are salient to sales professionals, namely role stress and job satisfaction. Further, we investigate the change in these outcomes before and after the implementation of sales technologies rather than only considering them at one point of time, after the fact.

The main purpose of this research is to understand how the sudden shift to work from home (WFH) after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught several sales organizations underprepared and ill-equipped to combat emergent challenges. In this research, the authors provide initial evidence into how the WFH arrangement impacts salespeople and sales organizations. Specifically, this research is guided by two objectives: to understand how the shift to WFH environment is affecting salespeople, and to explore how organizations can mitigate dysfunctional effects of the shift to WFH practices and enhance salespeople’s commitment toward this new reality.

The authors did preliminary in-depth interviews with 13 executives operating in the business-to-business (B2B) space to identify themes that reflected the reality faced by B2B sales organizations when transitioning to WFH. The authors then conducted a quantitative study involving a survey with 130 B2B salespeople.

The findings from the qualitative research suggested that the WFH situation is quite different from the more traditional remote selling situations that B2B salespeople are used to. More specifically, salespeople experienced more anxiety because of the WFH situations. This finding was supported in the empirical study done by the authors where stress associated with WFH and job insecurity had a significant impact on salesperson anxiety.

The study primarily used subjective responses of salespeople with no objective measures. Furthermore, this study is cross-sectional in nature. Future research should build on the present work to understand the long-term consequences of WFH and factor in customer responses to the same. The impact of increased use of technology in the sales process will need further attention, including the sales management implication for the same.

Given the unforeseen nature of the COVID pandemic and how unprepared salespeople and sales organizations were to deal with it, this study is one of the first studies that documents the impact of WFH situations on salespeople.

This study aims to propose a conceptual framework based on organisational and environmental indicators of business-to-business sellers’ sales performance in services firms.

A descriptive research design was applied and data was gathered from 389 respondents across industries and different-sized services firms in Norway using a self-administered questionnaire.

Results show that the proposed six-dimensional framework of organisational and environmental indicators can be applied to manage seller–customer relationships in a business-to-business environment.

A six-dimensional framework of organisational and environmental indicators is tested successfully in services firms.

Increasingly, services firms will need to work closely with business-to-business sellers to proactively adapt to market changes through a co-creation approach to build long-term seller–customer relationships.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous study has focused on relationship marketing in business-to-business relationships that proposes a conceptual framework based on organisational and environmental indicators of business-to-business sellers’ sales performance in services firms.

Many companies are shifting their focus away from individual transactions toward developing long‐term, mutually supportive relationships with their customers. Salespeople are the main implementers of such relationships, as they act as the interface between companies and customers. Negotiation is an important part of relationship development, but salespeople’s negotiating styles are influenced by culture and the ability to adapt to cultures of specific markets and specific customers. This study proposes a simple conceptual model of how cultural issues at three different levels – national, organizational, individual – influence salespeople’s negotiating styles. Qualitative in‐depth interviews were employed to explore the impact of national culture, organizational culture, and individual sales rep competence in dealing with culture on salespeople’s negotiating styles.

This study aims to investigate the impact of a salesperson’s psychological capital (PsyCap) on sales performance through the interplay of work engagement and performance feedback. This study examines the role of thought self-leadership (TSL) as an antecedent of a salesperson’s PsyCap.

Grounded in the social cognitive theory and job demands–resources theory, a hypothesized model is proposed. To test the hypothesized model, data on sales professionals were collected from B2B sales organizations, and a structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that TSL drives PsyCap in salespeople. The results also suggest an interesting relationship between salesperson’s PsyCap and their sales performance through work engagement as a mediator for PsyCap and sales performance. The moderating effect of performance feedback on work engagement was not significant and thus counterintuitive.

The results suggest that organizations should invest in training to develop the TSL of their salesforce, which will lead to enhanced performance through personal resources such as PsyCap. Further, the findings have implications for sales organization designs and structure.

This study augments the extant information on the linkage between a salesperson’s PsyCap and sales performance by suggesting mediation mechanisms and proposing an integrated framework with work engagement. Further, the authors establish TSL as an important cognitive mechanism to strengthen PsyCap in salespeople.

The purpose of this study is to examine the current state of job announcements relating to sport ticket sales and service positions in the USA.

Content analysis methodology was utilized to examine 733 sport sales job announcements from two subscription‐based sport job websites posted over a six month time period.

Sport sales jobs were geographically clustered with over half of the positions within only eight states, led by California (12.7 percent), New York (9.3 percent), Texas (7.2 percent), and Florida (7.2 percent). The majority of organizations posting jobs were specific teams or integrated sport/entertainment companies owning specific teams (76 percent), followed by media firms (11 percent), outsourced sales firms (6 percent), and sporting goods companies (6 percent). Of the 12 major job types, inside sales positions were the most common (32.3 percent) followed by sponsorship sales (13 percent) and media advertising (12 percent). Logistic regression revealed that directors and non‐entry level hires were more likely to supervise other salespeople and utilize consultative sales techniques, while a strong work ethic and cold calling was sought from entry‐level personnel.

Sport sales hiring managers and sport management academicians can utilize survey results in preparing education and training programs for entry‐level sport salespeople, including the use of experiential learning and sport sales combined.

As the first study to empirically examine the nature of sport sales positions, it provides academicians and future sport management and sales employees with the elements of sport‐related sales most prized within the sport industry.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the lived experiences of salespersons’ work engagement and work-related flow and how these states are related.

A mixed-methods qualitative investigation on a sample of 14 salespeople from a large Australian-based consumer goods enterprise was conducted. Using interpretative phenomenological analyses and ethnographic content analyses the antecedents and conditions for salesperson work engagement and work-related flow were investigated.

The data showed that affective, cognitive and conative dimensions underpinned the experience of work engagement and work-related flow. Work engagement was interpreted as an aroused and self-regulated psychological state of energy, focus and striving aimed to address the situational and task relevant opportunities and demands encountered. Work-related flow was characterized by passion, absorption, eudaimonia and automatic self-regulation of goal pursuit.

The sample was from a single manufacturing organization with sales roles focussed primarily on business-to-business selling, and as such the generalizability of results to salespeople working in different contexts (e.g. retail sales, telesales) needs to be established.

The research helps sales managers to take more account of the conditions that foster salesperson engagement and flow.

This study represents one of the first attempts to interpret, compare and contrast the lived experience of salesperson work engagement with that of work-related flow. The study also adds to the relative paucity of research published on work engagement using qualitative methods.

The impact of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance has received initial support in literature in recent years. However, no studies have explored if this impact should vary according to the career stage that the employee is in. If an interaction effect exists, then managers should expect different results when coaching people in different stages of their careers. Otherwise, all employees (independently of their career stage) can benefit from the positive impact of coaching and, thus, the manager can expect a continuous positive outcome on employee performance throughout their careers. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the moderation effect of an employee’s career stage on the relationship between managerial coaching and performance.

A sample of 318 financial advisors from two Canadian banks was used to collect data on the amount, and quality, of managerial coaching received by the employees, as well as their performance. multigroup confirmatory factor analysis ran in AMOS was used to test the moderation effect of experience.

Results confirmed the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee behavioral and sales performance, but no moderation effect was found. The measuring and causal models showed invariance for employees in their early (one to seven years of selling experience), middle (8-15 years), and late (more than 15 years) career stages, suggesting that managerial coaching will make a consistent contribution to performance throughout all the stages of the employee’s career.

The study makes two main contributions to the scientific literature. First, it offers an original study examining the effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector. Second, it examines the role of selling experience as a moderator in coaching processes, thus contributing to the limited literature on career stages.

The study suggests that managers should equally devote their coaching efforts to all employees, independently of their selling experience. Contrary to the belief that rookies will benefit more from coaching, and that “you cannot teach an old dog new tricks,” results suggest that managerial coaching makes a continuous contribution to performance throughout all the stages of an employee’s career.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderation effect of selling experience on coaching consequences, and one of the few to present evidence of the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector.

The retail environment of the future is likely to be increasingly competitive. Department and specialty stores must provide services which distinguish them from the competition. One method that may be used in attaining a distinctive position entails the development of a well‐trained, skilled retail salesforce. Examines retail sales training from the perspectives of 202 retail salespeople employed by full‐service retailers. Provides insight into the amount of training which should be provided and the topics which should be included in sales training programs.