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This paper aims to understand how organizational and interpersonal relationships influence selling centers, and how to form an effective selling center to establish cooperation among the functional departments to satisfy customer needs.

The selling center and social capital literatures are reviewed. A social network perspective is employed to explore the internal and external relationships of corporate selling centers.

Building upon social capital literature and team literature, the authors propose that selling center performance is influenced by its internal and external social capital. Social capital influences selling center performance through facilitating knowledge transfer and absorption within and across the selling center.

The findings help sales managers diagnose the problems of the social networks among their selling center members, to improve their selling center performance in the future.

The paper investigates the relationships among social capital, knowledge transfer and absorption and team performance in the selling center context. By considering both intra‐firm relationships and inter‐firm relationships, this study provides a relatively complete picture of selling center performance and adds knowledge to the field.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an in‐depth understanding of the issues that organizations consider and experience when making the decision to adopt B2B technologies.

The paper uses a qualitative approach to collect and analyze data. In‐depth interviews were conducted to help generate new themes, and ideas about B2B technology adoption. After the data were collected, the authors used an elaborate multi‐stage process to code, analyze, and interpret the data generated from the interviews.

The main theme that emerged out of this study is that an organization's response to requests from its trading partner to adopt B2B technologies is highly influenced by its marketing channel orientation. The study identifies three types of marketing channel orientations that can influence a firm's technology adoption decision and demonstrates how each of these orientations influence a firm's responses and attitudes towards B2B technology adoption.

The study is important to practitioners since it helps them recognize the value of understanding their trading partner's channel strategies and orientations as they develop strategies to get their suppliers to adopt B2B technologies. It also contributes to the academic literature by demonstrating the value of a firm's channel strategy orientation, a very important concept that has been ignored in the channels and B2B technology adoption literature.

The purpose of this article is to develop and propose a comprehensive framework that identifies the factors that influence a company’s decision to adopt business to business (B2B) technologies.

The authors review the literature regarding technology adoption from multiple disciplines including: Supply Chain Management, Logistics, Sociology, Information Systems, Marketing and Economics. A synthesis of the review provides the foundation for developing a comprehensive model of inter-firm technology adoption.

The review and synthesis finds inconsistencies in the theoretical models and constructs used in previous studies of inter-firm technology adoption. The comprehensive framework presented identifies four major categories of antecedents to technology adoption: characteristics of a technology, organizational factors, external factors and relationships. The presented model focuses attention on the inclusion of relational factors that affect the adoption of B2B technology.

An important area that has been ignored in the inter-firm adoption literature is the impact of inter-firm relationships on technology adoption. This paper emphasizes the importance of inter-firm relationships and identifies power, trust and justice as important relationships that influence the adoption of inter-firm technologies.

The expanded framework identifies the antecedents of B2B technology adoption, which can be used as a guiding framework by both academics and practitioners. The paper also offers directions for future work in the form of propositions.

The aim of this paper is to provide understanding on how the buyer can mobilize experience-based information scattered around the business network, by means of customer references, word-of-mouth and reputation, and how this facilitates the buying process.

The qualitative study scrutinizes eight cases comprising buyers of knowledge intensive services and technology innovations. The paper draws on the literature on buying and purchasing, customer references, word-of-mouth and reputational information.

The findings identify the different roles of references, word-of-mouth, collegial advice networks, and reputation, and suggest that experience-based information provides information on offerings, suppliers and the problem solving situation in complex buying per se.

The article's contribution is to provide a framework depicting the employment of experience-based information in complex buying, which ensues through focal and continuous buying processes. Insights from this research are broadly applicable to the contexts of knowledge intensive, innovation and solutions business. Further qualitative research should aim to form constructs and define their interrelations to be tested in subsequent quantitative research.

This study generates new understanding on how buyers gather and use experience-based information to solve complex problems in buying. It contributes by merging references, word-of-mouth, collegial social networks, and reputation as sources of experience-based information, identifying information embedded in those means, and exploring how the information and means are used throughout the complex buying situation.

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors influencing firm adoption of internet banking services (IBS). While previous literature has primarily focused on the individual consumers’ adoption, we aim to shed light on the adoption of online banking by firms. We investigate the propensity and speed of IBS adoption and offer recommendations to providers of IBS and firm users.

To attain the above purpose a conceptual model was based on research about IBS adoption in the firm context that derives primarily from technology acceptance model and diffusion of innovation. We use data from 5,002 firms located in 239 counties, encompassing 52.1% of firms users of IBS of a financial service provider and 47.9% of non-user firms. All sampled firms received an offer to adopt IBS from the financial service provider. Such unique data set was analyzed using logistic regression to assess propensity and a survival analysis model to assess IBS adoption speed.

Results revealed that firms, with high propensity to adopt IBS, operate with a diverse management board, are large and young, and compete with a large number of firm users. The survival model showed that the diverse composition of management board also speeds up IBS adoption.

Several implications are drawn from our findings. For instance, managers in firms adopting IBS should invest in recruiting and retaining a diverse set of board members (e.g. internal and external with full decision power), which allows for thorough assessment of pros and cons of any relevant decision to be made. We also highlight implications for managers in financial service providers (e.g. Bank) that offer IBS to automate the relationship with customer firms. Managers should consider our study as a template for the selection criteria of firms that are likely to accept the IBS offer.

This is one of few empirical studies to investigate the adoption of IBS in a firm context. Previous studies focused on the individual consumer adoption of IBS. We show that adopting diverse set of board management, growing in size, young firms and facing the competitive environment positively influence firm´s propensity to adopt IBS. We also analyze the time spent by firms from the IBS offering to the adoption, which shows that management decision context play a key role in adoption speed. Our research contributions add to the scarce ongoing discussion about firm´s adoption of IBS.

This paper aims to examine the role of social norms of justice and relationalism in salesperson–sales manager relationships, and their role in developing salesforce commitment and turnover.

This study uses structural equation modeling to analyze survey data from 402 business-to-business salespeople.

As discrete foundational norms, distributive, procedural and interactional (interpersonal, informational) justice develop higher-order norms of relationalism, which then reflect on increased commitment and reduced turnover intention of the salesforce. Among the justice norms, interpersonal justice has the strongest impact on relationalism.

The paper shows how each justice norm has a distinct impact in shaping relational norms, and that interpersonal justice has the highest impact. In addition, with enhanced relationalism salespeople become more committed and have lower turnover intentions. Future research could use a longitudinal study, present manager’s side in the model and measure and compare the impact of supervisor- versus organization-focused justice.

To enhance relationalism, and thus in turn increase commitment and decrease turnover intention of salesforce, sales managers should pay attention to the salespeople’s perceptions of justice norms (distributive, procedural, informational and interpersonal justice), especially interpersonal justice, as it has the highest impact on relationalism. The specific ways to enhance justice perceptions are discussed.

This paper is the first to show how each justice norm is unique in its importance to shape the relationship between sales manager and salespeople in a way that increases the quality of relational norms, governing the relational process into a highly committed one. It also shows that among the four justice norms, interactional justice has the highest impact on relationalism. In addition, this is the first study to show that relationalism decreases turnover intention of salespeople.

This study aims to examine the role of channel strategies in value appropriation and their effects on firm value with the consideration of situational factors.

An empirical study with secondary data is conducted in the context of public franchised channels. The authors use Entrepreneur Franchise Top 500 (2012) as the sampling frame and merge the data from three sources to create the final data set. A set of models are built to test the hypotheses in a hierarchical manner.

Value appropriation provides a solid rationale to link marketing channel strategies to firm value. Channel integration is an effective strategy driving intangible firm value. The influence of channel compression on intangible firm value depends on its interaction with other marketing environmental variables.

First, the sample size in this study is relatively small though these samples show high representativeness. Second, the empirical analysis in this study focuses on the franchised channels because of data availability.

Managers should consider the role of value appropriation when developing new channel strategies. A channel strategy deserves firm-level attention and resources because of its relevance to firm value. Managers should examine channel environment carefully and deploy internal resources to augment the potential of value appropriation strategies in channels.

This study is among the first to investigate the value relevance of marketing channel strategies from a value appropriation perspective. It identifies profit appropriation and resource appropriation as two mechanisms of value appropriation in marketing channels and uses these two processes to link channel integration and channel compression strategies with firm value.

This paper aims to examine a longitudinal study of mentoring functions and their effect on salesperson attitudes and intentions.

The research is based on a multi-year study of salespeople beginning when the salesperson entered the industry being examined.

The level of interaction between the mentor and protégé was found to be the only antecedent examined that related to the perceived quality of mentoring functions. Age, education and length of employment for both parties; the degree of age and education difference; and the length of the mentoring relationship were not significant. Successful mentoring appeared to be based heavily on a mentor’s willingness and ability to interact frequently with the protégé.

This study adds to the literature on mentoring, looking at mentoring in a sales context. Research examining mentoring in a sales setting is much more limited than in many other professions, so the findings represent a valuable addition to the sales mentoring literature. Its influence on sales socialization may be very important.

This meta-analysis aims to explore the true effect sizes of major channel performance drivers from different theoretical perspectives and how these true effects are organized in a theoretically integrated structural analysis to predict performance.

First, it offers a quantitative summary on the drivers of channel performance through pairwise correlation analysis. Second, it tests an integrative framework of various performance drivers based on the relational view by using structural equation modeling. Last, it examines the potential moderation on the effects of performance drivers.

The synthesized effects of various channel performance drivers confirm the effectiveness of underlying theoretical perspectives of channel performance. The relational view is effective to identify immediate interorganizational drivers of channel performance. The contexts and methods of performance assessment have an impact on the appraisal of performance drivers.

The performance drivers included in this meta-analysis are constrained to variables that exist in empirical channels literature and have sufficient primary data for analysis. Moderation tests are constrained by the report of research contexts and methods in original studies. Future research should broaden the theoretical perspectives on channel performance.

First, leveraging key routines and processes embedded in marketing channel relationships is critical to improve channel performance. Second, more targeted effort to manage channels in different markets may improve the efficiency of channel performance enhancement. Last, a comprehensive performance assessment process is necessary to avoid biased estimation of performance drivers.

This meta-analysis provides a systematic review of factors influencing marketing channel performance by synthesizing and correcting the effect sizes of performance drivers from different theoretical perspectives. It further develops and tests an integrative model of four immediate interorganizational drivers of channel performance.

This study aims to explore the effects of three competency layers of personality on salesperson effort and performance: self-efficacy, competitiveness and entrepreneurial motivation.

A two-study approach with data from 285 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople in the USA and 342 B2B/business-to-consumer salespeople in Poland is used. This study has also used structural equation modelling with partial least squares, common method assessment and mediation testing.

The findings show that across both studies, entrepreneurial motivation relates directly and positively to effort: salespeople with a greater entrepreneurial motivation exert more effort to perform their sales-related tasks. In addition, competitiveness and self-efficacy are two antecedents of entrepreneurial motivation in a sales context.

This study introduces the concept of entrepreneurial motivation as a goal orientation.