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Integrating relationship marketing and management research, the author explores internal selling (i.e., a salesperson’s internally focused efforts intended to identify, solicit, and use internal sales resources to support external selling activities) as a unique source of salespeople role stress and examine its contingent outcomes. The conceptual model suggests that internal selling as a job demand and stressor leads to increased salespeople role stress. However, a number of situational (i.e., selling organization market orientation, service climate, and seller–buyer relationship) and individual factors (i.e., networking ability and psychological capital of the salespeople) serve as job and personal resources to moderate the internal selling–outcome relationships, such that when such resources are adequate, internal selling will reduce role stress and increase sales performance. The author also examines situational (i.e., customer solutions offering and formalization of the selling organization) and individual (i.e., salespeople power and social status) antecedents of internal selling. The model provides useful insights and practical guidance for selling organizations to recognize mechanisms associated with internal selling in their organizations, and to intentionally design within organization support systems to enhance salespeople well being and enable them to participate effectively in the relational process of selling. The chapter stresses the need to develop context-specific stress models for different occupations and job roles.

If any organization wants to be globally recognized leadership plays an important role. This chapter deals with the leadership failure in creating good salesperson behavior in India’s pharmaceutical industry. There are four types of salesperson’s behavior: selling orientation, customer orientation, adaptive selling, and unethical selling. Selling oriented and unethical selling behaviors negatively impact customer trust and customer value, while customer orientation and adaptive are more positive. This chapter explores how senior managers can create good organization culture and organization climate by creating positive sales behavior. This chapter will be an eye opener to many first-line managers for helping their salespersons to practice customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior.

Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.

This chapter describes how to do variable-based analysis of cases of two-person conversations. The chapter makes use of the same data that Chapter 9 describes. Here, the study examines 40 transactions between actual insurance salespersons (n = 3) and prospective clients (n = 57) interacting in field settings. The study describes conversations among purchase behavior and the frequency of key orientation and bargaining statements made by the salespersons and customers. The findings support the high value in studying social factors, influence attempts, and situation variables in constructing a general conceptualization of exchange relationships.

Introduction: – Together with the increasing competition between businesses each day, the sales and marketing process of products and services have become increasingly difficult. For this reason, sales have become a marketing activity with an ever-growing importance to businesses. The performance of salespeople who undertake this challenge on behalf of the business is highly valuable for firms. Many researches have noted that there is a relationship between the performance of salesperson and motivation. The purpose of motivation in sales literature is to direct salespeople to exert more effort in reaching sales-oriented goals and aims. In order to ensure this, many businesses use various motivation tools/factors.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to analyse the effect of motivation factors on performance of salesperson.

Methodology – Quantitative research method was used in the study. A questionnaire was prepared with this aim in mind and administered to 315 employees working as salesperson in Çanakkale and Bursa provinces.

Findings – The findings from the analysis of the data show that the five dimensions namely satisfaction, image, relations, knowledge of product and service and advertisement related to motivation factors have a significant effect on the task performance of the salesperson.

This chapter starts with the phenomenon of CRM systems being sometimes more considered as a burden than a support by salespeople. The main argument is that CRM tools do barely fit the needs of salespeople as their functions, most of all, are administrative, which leads to a resistance for using them.

The author shows how this kind of shortcomings are manifested in “real-life” operations and finds out that much of the problems seem to be due to the very architecture of extant CRM systems. Indeed, creative offerings and business development imply advanced cognitive processes for which there are no functions in traditional CRM tools.

Therefore, the core part of the chapter leads to a discussion on how genuine supportive CRM systems architecture should be designed. The sales process is made of three phases beyond the administration one, namely, a sense-making, a sense-giving, and a sense-acting phase. An adequate architectural design would take into consideration functions that support the whole process, which also includes informative links and a much more visual design to process information instantly.

Three major environmental changes are taking place regarding business-to-business salesforce. The first trend is the marketing discipline's shift from a product-focus to a service-focus. In response, firms are shifting their salesforce from a product-focus to providing integrated products and services or solutions to their customers. The second trend that is affecting salesforce is the enhanced utilization of technology, as technology is being used to handle some selling tasks (e.g., information provisioning). The third trend is globalization that is evolving to a stage where global salesforce originating from different countries is interacting with customers from different countries. This chapter suggests that these three trends are changing salesforce strategy, structure, and processes. The chapter reports on the decline in product-based salesforce, growth in customer-focused and global salesforce, globalization of salesforce, and the broader business and research implications. The shifts are dramatic and for researchers, it will be a new and fertile area of research.

Prior research has documented a generally positive relationship between employees’ standing on constructs that are commonly studied by positive psychologists and workplace outcomes, such as job performance and retention. Constructs such as adaptability, empowerment, hope, optimism, and resilience are believed to reflect psychological resources that employees can draw upon when facing adversity and challenges in their work, while also reflecting a general tendency or disposition to experience positive emotions and engage with others in ways that reflect such positive emotions. As such, positive psychology constructs may be particularly important for performance in jobs characterized by high levels of social interaction, stress, and challenge. In order to explore the manner in which different positive psychology constructs are related to sales performance, this chapter presents findings from a meta-analytic investigation into the relationships between sales performance and a variety of positive psychology constructs. Findings based on data from 59 unique samples and 14,334 salespeople indicate that some positive psychology constructs exhibit moderate to even strong relationships with the performance of salespeople, although the strength of these relationships appears to have been substantially inflated by common-source bias. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for selection and training within sales occupations, and advance an agenda for future research.

A book on case study research would be remiss without a chapter that introduces the reader to relevant literature on personal exchanges and face-to-face talk. Chapter 9 offers a conceptual property–space analysis for theory and research on personal exchanges including talk. The chapter describes a study on face-to-face conversation analysis (i.e., talk) in a buyer–seller context. The study includes examining forty transactions between actual insurance salespersons (n=3) and prospective clients (n=57) interacting in field settings. The chapter reports the relationships between purchase behavior and the frequency of key orientation and bargaining statements made by the salespersons and customers. The findings support the importance of studying social factors, influence, and situation variables in constructing a general conceptualization of exchange relationships.

The sharp increase in interest in social networks among marketing scholars and practitioners has coincided with the rapid proliferation of social networks among broader populations. Considering the substantial body of research that has emerged, it is an opportune time to reflect on the state of social network research (SNR) in marketing. Therefore, this chapter reviews recent marketing research, organized according to substantive areas of interest, followed by a discussion of critical dimensions of SNR for researchers, including network actor characteristics, modes, boundaries, impacts, and mechanisms, as well as the relevant level of analysis. By documenting how SNR can inform marketing decisions and influence marketing outcomes, this study also establishes recommendations for research to advance the state of SNR in marketing. A 2 × 2 classification schema reveals four categories that might guide scholars' choices of research designs, theories, constructs, and measures for SNR.