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There is growing awareness that careers grow and change in a variety of ways during a person's work life. One change is in people's concerns and goals for their careers. This article discusses how people's career concerns will change over their working lives. The results indicate that the career goals of salespeople have a significant relationship to job attitudes and behavior. Management implications for recruiting and selection, motivating individual salespeople, and strategic sales force analysis are discussed.

Given India's rapid industrial growth and burgeoning numbers of sales and marketing employees, there is an urgent need to develop India‐centric B2B sales management knowledge. However, there is little hard information about similarities or differences between sales management strategies in India and the developed economies. To shed more light on this issue, in this commentary the aim is to report the results of a novel exploratory study of recent India B2B sales job ads motivated by the idea that sales recruiting is a critical sales management function that provides insights into hiring organizations' overall business strategy.

The authors content analyze a sample of India sales job ad postings to identify the job goals, skills and additional roles sought by Indian B2B sales recruiters. Subsequently, they use latent class clustering to segment companies along these requirements.

It is found that B2B sales organizations in India appear to be recruiting according to the same core strategies, principles and criteria as those in the developed world, especially with regard to customer management.

This research develops confidence that some extant B2B sales management theories, models, and knowledge accumulated in developed markets are applicable to the Indian context, with suitable modifications to accommodate idiosyncratic cultural and economic differences.

This is the first, albeit exploratory, effort to utilize the content of India‐specific B2B sales job advertisements as a source of data and insights into sales management strategies in India.

Although salesperson motivation has been widely researched within the USA, the purpose of this paper is to examine similarities and differences in salesperson motivation in different countries and cultures.

Hypotheses of differences in motivation dimensions between Eastern and Western sales forces are proposed based on previous cross‐cultural and motivation research. An archival assessment database with data from over 120,000 salespeople is used to examine the hypotheses.

Salespeople from Western cultures are more motivated by the needs for achievement, relationships, and power than salespeople from Eastern cultures. The results for the relationship hypothesis were unexpected.

The study provides an important first step to conduct more research on global sales force motivation.

Identifying or confirming the salesperson motivations that exist in other countries will provide critical insight to sales managers as they recruit and develop a global sales force operating in multiple markets. Recruiting a sales force with motivations consistent with the cultural norms of a foreign market could lead to a significant competitive advantage.

Managing sales forces in multinational contexts is a topic about which little empirical work has been done. This article reports the results of a 14‐MNC, 135 subsidiary, survey of multinational sales management practices, focusing in particular on the extent to which head offices influence sales functions in subsidiaries. An industry‐by‐industry analysis shows that electronic data processing affiliates get considerable head office attention while general consumer goods subsidiaries do not.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of salesperson coachability and to propose potential relationships between it and sales coaching and sales performance.

This conceptual paper reviews the sales coaching and sales performance literature to highlight how the knowledge of each may be enhanced by the coachability construct. The concept of athletic coachability is then introduced to explain why it should be adapted and applied to salespeople in a personal selling context.

Adapting and applying the concept of athlete coachability to salespeople in a personal selling context may provide sales management practitioners and academics a better understanding of how certain salesperson personality traits combine and interact with certain situational influences to impact sales performance.

Future studies need to test the propositions advanced.

Salesperson coachability may be used by sales managers as a screening criterion for sales force recruiting and retention.

Salesperson coachability assessments for recruiting and training may result in lowering job turnover.

This paper introduces the concept of athletic coachability to the sales literature, argues why the concept should be adapted and applied to salespeople in a personal selling context, and advances testable propositions with respect to its expected relationship with sales coaching and sales performance.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The transition from marketing strategy to selling is seldom smooth. Too often it is left to chance but successful business results depend on effective management of this transition: coherent and consistent policies, and good communications all along the line from marketing executives to field salesmen.

This paper aims to answer a prominent question that arises for the manager who wishes to recruit a salesperson to maintain and develop a portfolio–customer relationship: Under which condition is this decision profitable for the firm? Though several authors have underscored the importance of the salesperson's role in the creation of purchaser–salesperson relationships, in the author's knowledge, no study has focused on the salesperson's profitability in the relationship approach. This issue is significant for sales managers because the investment in sales force is greater, and the relationship profitability with customers is not guaranteed.

Econometric model based on transaction cost economics theory and dynamic exchange between firm, salesperson and a customer. Specifically, this model links between customer life value, firm financial value, salesperson cost and relationship time.

Three zones are identified that can characterize the dynamic salesperson profitability. It was shown that only one zone can be profitable to the firm.

This result is important because it can solve the equivocal posit between scholars with regard to the success or the failure of relationship marketing. This study also specifies the critical retention rate, the critical duration time in which a salesperson begins to be profitable.

In the author's knowledge, this study is the first to use an exchange model to show in which conditions the salesperson will be profitable in relationship marketing.

An e‐recruitment program is helping Xerox Europe to find the right people for its Xerox Concessionaire sales network, created almost 20 years ago to extend the document company’s market coverage across the continent. Now established at the major Xerox sales channel, accounting for over 50 percent of revenues, the network employs more than 6,000 sales and support staff across Europe. They work in over 600 individual businesses of all sizes and maturity – all independently run but supported by the huge Xerox infrastructure and fuelled by the global reach of the Xerox brand.