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Discusses the results of a study designed to investigate how sales managers experience job stress. Considers the particular extra job responsibilities of managers compared with salespeople as stress factors. Concludes that over‐involvement and general dissatisfaction with life are more important job stress factors for sales managers than are personal characteristics.

Further explore the issue of sales management development and identify the practices most critical to sales managers' learning and development.

To explore the development needs of sales leaders, we surveyed 206 newer sales managers from ten US-based manufacturing and service organizations. The sample was 79 percent male and 21 percent female, averaged 2.2 years of sales management experience, 10.3 years of sales experience and 37.1 years of age.

Practices that sales managers considered to be important for their development are: clarifying roles, goals and performance expectations (81 percent); receiving effective performance appraisals and reviews (74 percent); exposure to challenging/difficult job assignments (71 percent); conducting formal career planning discussions (68 percent); receiving ongoing performance measurement, feedback and coaching (66 percent); being mentored by senior managers/sales people (60 percent); involvement with professional associations/affiliations (58 percent); and utilizing 360° feedback systems (57 percent).

If organizations are serious about developing their sales managers, they would be well served to consider the development practices presented in this study. Developing sales managers want clearly defined performance expectations as well as feedback from a wide variety of multi-sources including coaching, mentoring, and 360° processes. In addition, formal appraisals and career planning discussions, as well as the opportunity to participate in professional associations are desired areas of development.

Examines the impact of manager and salesforce antecedents on sales organization effectiveness, using a sample of 146 Australian sales units. Indicates that sales manager monitoring, directing, evaluating and rewarding activities distinguish between high and low sales unit profitability and managers’ satisfaction with their units. Suggests that sales territory design displays significant differences between high and low sales/market share and unit satisfaction. Discovers that several salesperson characteristics and performance were significantly different between high and low customer satisfaction effectiveness and managers’ satisfaction with sales units. Highlights significant antecedent roles for sales manager and salesforce antecedents of sales organization effectiveness.

The purpose of this study is to examine how trends in historical data influence two types of predictive judgments: territory selection and salesperson hiring. Sales managers are confronted frequently with decisions that explicitly or implicitly involve forecasting with limited information. In doing so, they conceptualize how the magnitude of these trend effects may be affected by the experience managers have in making these types of judgments. Study 1 provides evidence of a curvilinear relationship between experience and reliance on the trend data whereby the sales territory selections of novice sales managers exhibited greater susceptibility to informational trends than did the evaluations of naïve and expert decision-makers. A benchmark analysis in Study 2 further revealed that the salesperson selections made by novice and expert sales managers were equally biased, albeit in opposite directions, with novices overweighting and experts underweighting historical performance trends. Implications of these findings are discussed, as are avenues for future research.

The authors employ an online experimental design methodology of practicing managers. For Study 1, they use regression, whereas Study 2 uses a deterministic process to develop a priori predictive benchmark forecasts. Ordinary least squares is then used to estimate manager’s decisions, which are then compared to the predictive forecasts to determine accuracy.

Study 1 provides evidence of a curvilinear relationship between experience and reliance on the trend data whereby the sales territory selections of novice sales managers exhibited greater susceptibility to informational trends than did the evaluations of naïve and expert decision-makers. A benchmark analysis in Study 2 further revealed that the salesperson selections made by novice and expert sales managers were equally biased, albeit in opposite directions, with novices overweighting and experts underweighting historical performance trends.

The present inquiry is the first to provide insights into an important issue that has been the subject of equivocal findings, namely, whether experience in a judgmental domain exerts a facilitating or debilitating effect on sales manager decision-making. In this regard, some research supports the intuition that experience in making a particular type of decision can insulate managers from judgmental bias and, in doing so, improve decision quality (see Shanteau, [1992a] for a summary). In contrast, other work provides a more pessimistic view by demonstrating that the quality of decision-making is either unaffected by or can erode with additional experience (Hutchinson et al., 2010). To help reconcile these conflicting findings, the authors presented and tested a theoretical framework conceptualizing how trends may influence predictive judgments across three levels of decision-maker experience.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of the role managers and peers play in shaping salespeople's ethical behaviour. The model specifies that sales manager personal moral philosophies, whether sales managers themselves are rewarded according to the outcomes or behaviours of their salespeople, sales team job security, intra‐team cooperation, and sales team tactical performance all influence sales team ethical standards. In turn, ethical standards influence the probability that sales team members will behave (un)ethically when faced with ethical dilemmas.

The model is tested on a sample of 154 Finnish sales managers. Data were collected via mail survey. Analysis was undertaken using structural equation modelling.

Ethical standards appear to be shaped by several factors; behaviour‐based management controls increase ethical standards, relativist managers tend to manage less ethically‐minded sales teams, job insecurity impedes the development of ethical standards, and sales teams' cooperation activity increases ethical standards. Sales teams are less likely to engage in unethical behaviour when the teams have strong ethical standards.

Cross‐sectional data limits generalisability; single country data may limit the ability to generalise to different sales environments; additional measure development is needed; identification of additional antecedent factors would be beneficial.

Sales managers should consciously develop high ethical standards in sales teams if they wish to reduce unethical behaviour. Ethical standards can be improved if sales managers change their own outward behaviour (exhibit a less relativistic ethical philosophy), foster cooperation amongst salespeople, and develop perceptions of job security. How sales managers are rewarded may shape how they approach the management of ethical behaviour in their sales teams.

This paper appears to be the first to simultaneously examine both sales manager‐specific and sales team‐specific antecedents to sales team ethical standards and behaviours. As such, it provides an important base for research in this critical area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of sales manager support in promoting the subjective well‐being of salespeople as well as the function of the sales manager in cultivating positive, motivating and productive environments.

An exploratory assessment of the relationship between sales manager support and emotional health in salespeople was conducted by interviewing sales professionals from diverse industries. The insight offered from these individuals, in conjunction with prior literature, provided the basis for the development of a conceptual model that elucidates the impact of sales manager support on the emotional well‐being of salespeople and subsequently salesperson effectiveness. The model was tested using 154 salespeople. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Results indicate that sales manager support is negatively related to emotional exhaustion and rumination, but positively associated with fostering positive working environments and future expectations. Salesperson motivation is positively related to positive working environments and customer‐oriented selling and negatively related to emotional exhaustion.

The study is cross‐sectional in nature and no causal relationships could be established. Future studies might include field experiments that assess the effect of sales manager support on salesperson's well‐being and behavior.

The study demonstrates the important role sales managers have in promoting the subjective well‐being of salespeople.

This research addresses how sales manager coaching specifically impacts elements of a salesperson's emotional health.

As the influx of women entering sales positions is increasing, a growing (albeit relatively small) number of saleswomen have been promoted into first‐line sales management positions. A key question facing these managers is what kind of leadership style they should use with their sales staffs. Answers to this question are presently ambiguous. This paper reports the results of an investigation which focussed on which of four leadership approaches enhances performance of female sales managers’ sales personnel. Findings imply that women sales supervisors should give serious consideration to adopting a “contingent reward” leadership style. Also offers managerial implications.

Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is discretionary employee behaviour that promotes organizational effectiveness, and has become recognized as an issue of potentially substantial importance in the management of sales operations. Identifies sales management control strategy as an important antecedent to salesperson OCB, which has been neglected in prior OCB research. Uncovers an important gender dimension in the display of OCB by salespeople, not previously investigated, and identifies an important relationship between sales manager gender and the OCB displayed by a sales unit or team, which is associated with the effectiveness of the sales unit. The findings have a number of important implications for managers concerned with enhancing sales organization effectiveness, as well as identifying a number of promising research directions.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of sales performance measurement by developing an organizing framework for classifying sales performance measures based on the various performance criteria used by researchers. Subsequently, the results of both a focus group and in‐depth interviews with sales managers and salespeople will be presented using the classification framework developed. The objective is to determine whether gaps exist between how researchers and practitioners view and classify salesperson performance measures as well as to provide insights to effective sales management practices in areas such as salesperson skill development, goal attainment, resource allocation, and customer relationship management.

A qualitative study, using in‐depth interviews, explores the relationship between sales managers and salespersons and their respective views on sales performance measurement. The interview questions were developed using information derived from a sales executive focus group. In‐person in‐depth interviews were conducted with eight sales managers and eight salespeople from eight organizations.

The paper proposes a new method for organizing the types of performance measures that are used, crossing effectiveness‐efficiency with internally‐externally‐focused measures. The findings indicate that a gap appears to remain between the attributes of performance that researchers focus on and what occurs in the world of sales.

The findings suggest that sales control theories can be used to present an organizing framework of sales performance based on sales outputs, salesperson skill/capability development, sales activities, and market indicators. Our typology might serve as a way to better understand certain research areas where there have been inconsistent findings, and should lead to new measure development for empirical research. In addition, a number of manager and salesperson recommendations for the practicing sales manager are reviewed.

This paper helps to clarify an area that is characterized by ambiguity and an identified need to identify new performance metrics.

A great deal has been written about the importance of marketers evolving into more relationship‐oriented selling practices. It is unclear however, the degree to which this evolution has impacted on the coaching practices of sales managers. Reports a survey of 143 sales managers engaged in business‐to‐business sales which indicates that coaching activities have been influenced by the need to build relationships with customers. In turn, this orientation will affect a number of new organizational concerns.