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The current study aims to empirically examine the impact of formal salesforce control systems on salespeople and customer behavior.

Data are collected from 704 salespeople and their respective visiting customers (704) in Ghana. The suggested hypotheses are tested through the structural equation (SEM) modeling technique.

The study results show that all three formal control mechanisms have positive and significant effects on customer-directed problem-solving and adaptive selling behaviors. Similarly, the study finds that salespeople's customer-directed problem-solving behavior increases, respectively, customer-directed opportunism and relationship continuity. Adaptive selling behavior also has significant positive effects on both customer-directed opportunism and relationship continuity, respectively.

The study offers practical and theoretical insights into understanding salesforce control dynamics, customer-directed opportunism, adaptive selling behavior, customer-directed problem-solving behavior and continuity of relationships. The results also have significant consequences for sales organizations as they can help sales managers decide on the best form of salesforce control systems to deploy.

The current research demonstrates how control mechanisms can influence both adaptive selling and customer-directed problem-solving behaviors and how these could generate both customer-directed opportunism and relationship continuity.

This study sets out to empirically investigate the effect of salesforce output control on perceived job autonomy, customer-oriented selling behaviours and sales performance.

Data are gathered from 704 salespeople and their visiting customers in Ghana. The hypotheses are tested using the structural equations modelling technique (SEM).

According to the findings of the study, output control has a significant and positive impact on perceived job autonomy. It also discovers that perceived job autonomy improves both customer-directed problem solving and adaptive selling behaviours. Furthermore, the study finds that customer-directed problem solving and adaptive selling behaviours both improve sales performance. Moreover, the study uncovers that perceived job autonomy mediates the relationship between output control and customer-oriented selling behaviours, whereas both customer-oriented selling behaviours mediate the relationship between perceived job autonomy and sales performance.

The current study provides both practical and theoretical insights into salesforce control dynamics, job autonomy, adaptive selling behaviour, customer-directed problem-solving behaviour and sales performance. The findings have important implications for sales organisations because they can assist sales managers in determining the best type of salesforce control systems to deploy and highlight the strategic role job autonomy plays in enhancing sales performance.

The current study shows how output control can influence salespeople's perceived job autonomy, adaptive selling and customer-directed problem-solving behaviours, and how these can improve sales performance.

The study examines the effects of behavior-based and outcome-based control systems on service-sales ambidexterity, role conflict, emotional exhaustion and job performance in salespeople.

Data are collected from 704 salespeople in Ghana. The proposed hypotheses are tested through the structural equations modeling technique.

The study finds that both behavior-based and outcome-based controls have positive and significant effects on service-sales ambidexterity in salespeople. Similarly, the study discovers that service-sales ambidexterity has a positive and significant impact on both role conflict and emotional exhaustion in salespeople. The study also finds that role conflict and emotional exhaustion both have a negative impact on job performance. Finally, the study finds that salespeople's grit moderates the negative relationship between emotional exhaustion and job performance.

The results imply that while salespeople's service-sales ambidexterity may be beneficial to their individual and firm performance, it may also lead to role conflict and emotional exhaustion.

The current study demonstrates how control mechanisms can lead to service-sales ambidexterity in salespeople and how this can lead to role conflict and emotional exhaustion.

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 extend sales control research to inside sales. Aside from a few notable exceptions (Conde et al., 2022) much of the sales control literature has focused on a single control mechanism rather than a sales control portfolio perspective. The authors add multiple layers to Conde et al. (2022) by capturing secondary operational data and manager interviews to access sales control theory in practice.

With operational data from a Fortune 100 financial services company and sales manager interviews, the authors present evidence that managers apply a portfolio of controls to ensure sales agents’ overall performance.

Findings support that cultural controls have a greater influence on overall performance than a focus solely on process and outcome controls. Inside sales managers can generate better results when they focus on creating an employee-centric culture rather than controlling sales agents with formal sales controls.

This study extends sales control research by examining inside sales managers’ formal and informal sales controls. Historically, inside sales had sales leaders balance a myriad of sales controls grounded in strict oversight. With a few notable exceptions, the limited inside sales control research provides the opportunity to display an inside sales manager’s need to jointly focus on operational results and sales outcomes, illustrating the importance of cultural controls compared to other sales process and outcome controls. This research considerably extends sales controls research by focusing on inside sales.

This study which is positioned in the ambit of control research investigates the impact of ex ante contractual completeness on opportunistic behaviors and ex post transaction costs, while assessing how these affect relationship termination intention. This study aims to examine alternative attractiveness as a necessary moderator of the nexus between transaction cost and relationship termination intention.

Data gathered from 211 companies in South Korea that have installed and run outsourced vending machines are analyzed and used to validate the study’s theoretical and empirical contributions.

The findings, which rely only on data from companies that outsource and those that run outsourced vending machines, show that contractual completeness negatively affects both active and passive opportunism. The study also discovers that active opportunism positively affects both bargaining costs and monitoring costs, whereas passive opportunism has a positive and direct effect on maladaptation costs but a negative effect on monitoring costs. It further finds that both bargaining and maladaptation costs have positive and direct effects on relationship termination intention, while monitoring costs have a negative effect on the same. Furthermore, it is observed that alternative attractiveness moderates the relationships between bargaining costs and relationship termination intention, as well as maladaptation costs and relationship termination intention.

This study demonstrates that contractual completeness can serve as an important ex ante control mechanism, whereas the two types of opportunism can raise transaction costs. Furthermore, alternative attractiveness is identified as a driver of the impact of transaction costs on relationship termination intention.

A key point of the departure of this study is that it examines the moderating role of alternative attractiveness in the relationship between transaction cost and relationship termination intention. The paper also advances the control literature by emphasizing the critical role that contractual completeness plays in reducing the occurrence of (both active and passive) opportunism in business relationships (especially companies that outsource).

For the past several decades, the sales control literature has focused on the outside sales context. This study aims to extend sales control research by examining formal and informal sales controls, embodied by cultural controls, used by sales managers in an inside sales context, where the sales agent’s performance focus extends beyond sales outcomes to include the influence of operational phone outcomes.

Based on 232 B2C and B2B inside sales agent survey responses, this study presents evidence that in an inside sales department, this study focuses on the congruent effect of formal sales and cultural sales controls on inside sales agent overall performance.

Based on 232 B2C and B2B inside sales agent survey responses, this study presents evidence that in an inside sales department, the operational focus of sales activities and resultant operational performance mediates the relationship between sales controls and inside sales agent sales performance, whereas cultural controls centered on maximizing inside sales autonomous motivation positively moderates the effect of operational outcomes on an inside sales agent’s sales performance.

By focusing on the tenants of an inside sales agent’s overall performance, this research provides practitioners a holistic view of the inherent conflict inside sales managers must balance between the impact of formal sales controls and the benefits of cultural controls.

By being the only study to examine sales controls in an inside sales context, with a broad definition of overall performance to include both sales and operational phone outcomes, this study extends sales control research to a new sales context. The need to jointly focus on operational results, as well as sales outcomes, illustrate the importance of cultural controls compared to other sales processes and outcome controls

Organizational climate is an essential dynamic to leverage in salesforce performance. This study aims to develop a model that explores the determinants of independent manufacturers’ representatives’ (i.e. IMRs’) intentions to comply with their principals’ requests for additional tasking. Using agency theory, the authors explore the application of behavior and outcome-based controls upon dyadic manufacturer-IMR relationships for these additional performance/task requests.

Data from over 1,000 US-based IMRs were used to test two constructs; inter-organizational climate and perceptions of mutual satisfaction within the agency-principal dyad. Compliance behaviors tested were IMRs’ intentions to engage in non-selling-related tasks and intentions to allocate additional selling time to principals’ products. The following four exogenous controls were tested: perceived goal congruence between IMRs and principals; IMRs’ perceptions of principals’ expertise; mutual communications between IMRs and principals in the supply chain dyad; resources and sales support programs provided by principals to IMRs; and IMRs’ perceptions of the adequacy and fairness of the principals’ compensation plans.

Two constructs – inter-organizational climate and perceptions of mutual satisfaction with the agency-principal dyad – mediated the effects of exogenous sales controls on two compliance behaviors. The model’s data were analyzed using Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). A marker variable was deployed to check for common method variance also supported using the Partial least squares (PLS) factor solution. Most variables demonstrated significant direct and mediated effects on each compliance behavior. Variables that emphasized behavioral-based controls dominated intentions for IMRs to engage in non-selling tasks. The principal commission structure, the only sales outcome-based control in the study, most influenced IMRs’ intentions to commit additional sales time to their principals’ products.

This study only examined the intentions of IMRs to engage in additional selling activities and their intention to engage in non-selling tasks. Principals may desire longer-term commitments from IMRs. The model developed here can be modified to capture additional behavioral and attitudinal outcomes including, for example, the exit intentions of IMRs.

Principals are well-advised to foster a positive inter-organizational climate that fuels perceptions of mutually satisfying working relationships with their IMRs. These mutually satisfying working relationships can, by themselves, positively influence IMRs to acquiesce to reasonable requests made by principals. This advice appears to be particularly crucial when asking IMRs to engage in additional non-selling tasks. The total pattern of path estimates points to the conclusion that capable sales control plays an important role in fostering positive inter-organizational climates. The inter-organizational climate – mutual satisfaction link proved crucial as a mediator of the impact of sales controls on IMRs’ behavioral compliance intentions.

Knowing the impact of sales controls on IMR’s affords businesses the ability to use these controls for behavioral compliance intentions on non-selling tasks.

Management is constantly looking for ways to show how exactly the competitive advantage can be enhanced to achieve the desired results. As such, control mechanisms that are designed to ensure that the desired results are achieved play an important part in the successful implementation of a business strategy, which is why, in this study, the authors analyze how formal and informal control levels are deduced from the marketing decisions that operationalize the organizational strategy.

The authors conducted a cross-section survey among 301 marketing managers. To determine which types of strategies are prevalent, the authors performed a hierarchical cluster analysis using the IBM SPSS Statistics 24 software and then constructed an ANOVA table to see whether there are differences in the characteristics of the different clusters. To determine the configuration of marketing control across strategy typologies, the authors conducted a mean difference test, aligning marketing control mechanisms with the strategies under study, significantly changing the intensity levels from one to another.

It is worth emphasizing that higher levels of control are related to prospector strategic business units (SBUs) and that informal control was significantly more prevalent than formal control for all the strategy typologies the authors' studied.

This research provides empirical evidence to gain a better understanding of the role marketing decisions play on formal and informal control mechanisms.

Digital solutions (DS) that build on recurring revenue models (RRMs) offer new opportunities to continuously create and capture superior value. However, many firms fail to engage their sales force in digital solution selling (DS selling), leading to agency problems that receive little attention in literature. This study aims to examine the drivers of agency problems that surface in the transition toward DS selling and the sales control systems that resolve these problems.

The authors conducted a qualitative, inductive study. Data were collected from interviews with 72 marketing and sales managers representing 53 industrial firms transitioning toward DS selling.

DS selling is subject to adverse selection and moral hazard caused by motivation-related, opportunity-related and ability-related drivers. Input, capability, activity and outcome controls – detailed in this study – can resolve these agency problems.

The limitations of this study’s methodology and scope suggest several directions for future research. Methodology-wise, the authors mainly relied on cross-sectional interview data from informants in Central and Northern Europe. Scope-wise, more research is needed on the capabilities, processes and steering instruments supporting DS sales. Finally, only now do the authors begin to understand which compensation plans motivate DS selling.

The controls identified in this study help managers to steer their sales force in DS sales.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate DS sales control systems. Thereby, the authors enhance prior understandings of solution selling, agency problems and sales control systems.