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The digital transformation is dramatically changing the business-to-business (B2B) sales environment, challenging long-standing views regarding the critical competencies required of salespeople. This paper aims to explore the personal traits associated with sales performance in a digital selling environment.

Using template analysis, the researchers captured and coded over 21 h of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with senior sales leaders from various industry sectors, exploring their perceptions of the personal traits now required of B2B salespeople in the digital landscape.

The research identifies three high-level trait types critical to sales success within a digital selling environment: “analytical curiosity” – the natural motivation and ability to gather and synthesize sales-related knowledge, “empathetic citizenship” – the ability to establish initial rapport while building long-term trust and “disciplined drive” – the exertion of selling effort in a highly focused and methodical manner across all stages of the sales process.

The present data came from interviews with sales leaders in Canada. A more global sample may lead to additional insights. Moreover, the sample was drawn from long-cycle B2B sales environments; conclusions may differ for short-cycle or business-to-consumer markets.

This paper presents a framework for hiring and developing salespeople in the digital sales environment, identifying personal trait types that sales leaders should look for when hiring: analytical curiosity, empathetic citizenship and disciplined drive. The paper identifies how these trait types influence sales success, suggesting that sales leaders could coach and educate their teams to make the best use of them.

This paper presents a conceptual framework for hiring in the digital sales environment and introduces the trait of analytical curiosity not previously discussed in the literature.

This study aims to use cognitive appraisal theory to explain how organizational disruption influences the development of envy resulting in unethical selling practices, turnover intentions and a reduction in customer orientation that causes disruption to impact customer relationships. This research helps to address drivers of salesperson envy, the potential disruptions to customer relationships and the required need to invest in psychological resources to offset these negative effects.

A total of 211 salespeople were surveyed to test the hypotheses. First, the measurement model was validated using a confirmatory factor analysis. Next, the hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling AMOS 27. Mediation and moderated mediation were tested using the bootstrap method. Estimands were created within AMOS to test the indirect and interaction effects in the full model. A post hoc analysis further informed the findings.

The results show that the development of envy increases under conditions of organizational disruptions, leading to potential customer disruptions through turnover intentions, unethical selling behaviors and a reduction in customer orientation. In addition, the mediation analysis shows that envy drives the relationship between organizational disruption and unethical selling, turnover intentions and customer orientation through fully mediated relationships. Finally, the interaction effects between organizational disruption and psychological capital show high levels of psychological capital help to decrease the development of envy, thus reducing unethical selling behaviors and turnover intentions while increasing customer orientation.

The study provides practitioners with insights into how to reduce envy by investing in the psychological capital of their salesforce. The study also provides suggestions for handling disruptions and managing envy to prevent actions that act to damage customer relationships.

Salespeople are likely to encounter organizational disruption. Sales managers need to be prepared to manage the outcomes of organizational disruption as it impacts the sales force. Understanding how disruptions impact customer relationships through envy is an important yet under-explored topic. This research adds to and expands the sales literature using cognitive appraisal theory to help address drivers of salesperson envy and its potentially negative impact on customer relationships and shows the required need to invest in psychological resources to offset these negative effects. The study also helps expand the recent focus on worldwide disruptions by adopting another context for disruption stemming from organizational disruption.

This study aims to identify the changes in different selling situations/styles during and post-COVID scenarios.

To attain the above-mentioned objective, a qualitative study drawn upon the principles of the theories-in-use approach is conducted. The data were collected through 23 in-depth semistructured interviews, conducted with professional salespeople working at various levels in different industries. The data thus generated was analyzed through open, axial and selective coding, which resulted in three broad categories of changes in professional selling.

The findings of the study suggest that though sales jobs are perceived to be similar in nature, but there are differences in how various selling jobs are being performed. The same is the case with the effect of the pandemic on sales jobs. The authors found that every selling style faced a different challenge due to the pandemic and so is the case for the salespeople engaged in the respective selling practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research of its kind that has focused on the differences in various selling styles. Though the recent academic literature on personal selling does manifest the effect of the pandemic. But, in doing so, these studies have presented “personal selling” as an overarching concept encompassing all types of selling and have failed to differentiate between the various nuances of personal selling which include trade selling, technical selling, new-business selling and missionary selling.

This article aims to provide knowledge on the antecedents and consequences of individual proactive behaviour. The proposed research model includes two unexplored antecedents (experienced meaningfulness of work and industry competitive intensity) and one consequence (individual proficiency).

Data were collected from 297 salespeople working at 105 enterprises in a range of industries. Data analysis was performed by applying confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

The results show (1) a positive association between industry competitive intensity and salespeople’s experienced meaningfulness of work and their proactivity at work; (2) a positive relationship between salespeople’s proactive behaviour and their individual proficiency and (3) that salespeople’s proactivity mediates the relation between industry competitive intensity and the experienced meaningfulness of work and individual proficiency.

The results suggest that managers could stimulate proactive behaviour by increasing the experienced meaningfulness of work. They also indicate that it is not only individual factors that are relevant in stimulating proactive behaviour at work, as contextual factors (particularly external ones) can also influence individual decisions with regard to engaging or not in proactive behaviour. Our findings regarding the positive relationship between proactivity and proficiency would help managers to encourage salespeople’s proactive behaviour.

Service–sales ambidexterity (SSA) offers sales managers crucial information about dealing with customer service failures through an effective management control system. This study aims to scrutinize the relationships among SSA, salesforce control system, salesperson’s role stressors and service recovery performance (SRP) in the business-to-business (B2B) context.

An analysis is conducted based on survey data collected from 586 B2B sales employees participating in an extensive survey. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the proposed hypotheses.

Empirical findings suggest that behavior-based control harms SSA. On the other hand, outcome-based control has a positive impact on SSA. The research outcomes further disclose that SSA positively impacts salesperson role conflict and emotional fatigue, whereas emotional fatigue negatively impacts SRP. Salesperson resilience notably moderates the association between SSA and emotional fatigue.

The study addresses there is a dearth of research on SSA applying the sales management control system. When studying about ambidexterity in sales context, many supervisory styles have been explored; however, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic attempt to understand how sales management control systems play a role in SSA.

This study aims to help uncover corporate culture and values to attract and retain talent by understanding job reviews written by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople.

Over 40,000 job reviews on Glassdoor.com are analyzed by a dictionary-based content analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015), to explore the links between corporate culture and linguistics characteristics of reviews as articulated by B2B salespeople. This study adopted a multidimensional scaling approach based on the nine cultural value scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on this map uncovers differences in language patterns and emotions expressed across the profiles.

Findings reveal a map of corporate profiles with two dimensions, namely, product-centricity and customer-centricity, that divide salesforce subculture into a 2 × 2 matrix of four types: Empathic Innovators, Product Pioneers, Customer Champions and Commodity Traders.

This study combined two data sets, scores on CultureX’s nine cultural values (agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance and respect) and job reviews on Glassdoor.com. This research seeks to develop profiles of the organizational culture and to use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This study adds to the literature on salesforce subculture and showcases a solution to the methodological difficulty in categorizing and measuring culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to major sales strategy and process changes as many interactions migrated from face-to-face to virtual environments. The nature of the interactions changed, and sales firms, the sales function and salespeople created new processes to excel in virtual environments. As sales processes evolve further, this paper aims to focus on understanding the enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes. In addition, this study seeks to understand the characteristics of enduring shifts and how they are distinct from temporary shifts.

This qualitative analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the sales organizations and salespeople over the period from the start of the pandemic to early 2022. The authors interviewed 66 sales professionals from different countries and industries to better understand the temporary and enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes, adopting ad inductive and narrative approach.

There are four major findings. First, four key themes emerged: increased digitalization, resistance to digitalization, sales process changes and sales organization transformation. Second, changes are classified as temporary, permanent and accelerated changes. Third, some proposed changes were not supported. Finally, five findings were found that were not discussed in previous literature.

This paper finds distinctive findings that offer additional valuable insights that connect to and extend existing literature. These include emerging themes, classification shifts, unsupported proposed changes and unique findings.

The main purpose of this paper is to explain the preferences of consumers for using online payment services. This paper applies a unified theory model named stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory for exploration.

This is quantitative research based on the structural equation modelling method. The stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory was applied, whereby the author conducted an online survey through a structured questionnaire with users of mobile payment services. These consumers are using online payments for online shopping purposes. The survey was conducted all over India. The sample size is 355.

The study found that utilitarian, hedonic value and salesperson behaviour impact consumers satisfaction and behaviour while using online payment services. The study found that there is a significant direct relationship between consumer satisfaction and consumer behaviour. This study examines how financial mobile services contribute to e-commerce implementation, especially in the context of India.

This study incorporates a variety of factors, including the behaviour of salespeople, which affect consumer happiness, satisfaction and behaviour intention. This study reveals a direct relationship between consumer satisfaction and behavioural intention. Accordingly, the use of mobile banking and digital financial services has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. This study suggested that awareness about e-commerce services and mobile financial services is an important aspect of consumers satisfaction. Effective e-commerce services and mobile financial services have a positive impact on consumer behaviour.

This is a comprehensive model used for online payment services and directly related to emerging economies like India. This study examines the consumer willingness of the digital market in relation to online payment services. This study contributes to the relevant literature by simultaneously examining the role of e-commerce platform characteristics and online consumer psychology in influencing behavioural intention. Numerous factors have been revealed by this investigation.

This study explores the mediating effects of relationship marketing orientation (RMO) and service quality orientation (SQO) on market orientation, selling orientation, and policyholder retention in non-life insurance services. Additionally, it offers important recommendations for non-life insurers in Taiwan for policy development and improving policyholder retention.

Data were collected from a sample of policyholders belonging to the top five non-life insurance companies in Taiwan. The data were then analyzed with structural equation modeling.

RMO and SQO mediate the effects of the salesperson’s market orientation on policyholder retention. Thus, RMO and SQO are key factors influencing policyholder retention. Consequently, high levels of market orientation should be maintained to increase RMO and SQO, strengthening the retention rate of non-life insurance policyholders.

The main limitation of this study is its cross-sectional nature. In the future, researchers should collect data from other countries and service industries (e.g. banks, securities, and other financial institutions), expand to different insurance contexts (e.g. life insurance), and conduct longitudinal studies or experimental research.

The results of this study can act as a guide for providers of non-life insurance services. Based on the research results, we recommend decision-makers pay increased attention to increasing policyholder retention rates by strengthening their firm’s RMO and SQO.

Few studies have investigated the relationships among market orientation, selling orientation, RMO, SQO, and policyholder retention in non-life insurance services within Asian contexts in general and specifically in Taiwan. Thus, this study’s theoretical contributions, managerial implications (especially for decision-makers), and the proposed future research directions represent timely and valuable additions to the literature.

Trust is an important facilitator of successful B2B relationships. The purpose of this study is to investigate affect-based antecedents of both interpersonal and interorganizational trust, and their impact on the performance of buyer–supplier relationships. The authors ask two research questions: (1) What are affect-based dimensions of interpersonal and interorganizational trust? (2) How do interpersonal and interorganizational trust influence buyers’ operational performance?

The authors use data from an original survey of 156 buyer–supplier relationships between multinational enterprise subsidiaries and local suppliers in the Thai manufacturing sector to develop a structural model in which the authors test the hypotheses.

Consistent with social exchange theory and social psychology, the empirical analysis shows that affect-based dimensions at the individual level, namely, likeability, similarity and frequent social contact, and at the organizational level, namely, supplier firm willingness to customize and institutionalization of cooperation, are important for establishing trust. In addition, interpersonal trust enhances buyers’ operational performance indirectly via interorganizational trust.

Buying and selling firms may develop organizational trust by developing processes that enhance organizational trust. Individuals with purchasing or sales responsibilities may enhance trust in their personal relationship. However, such interpersonal trust needs to be translated to the organizational level to benefit organizational performance.

The findings contribute to the literature on affect-based antecedents and outcomes of trust. Specifically, the authors offer theory and empirical evidence regarding the contribution of salespersons toward affect-based dimensions of trust and its impact on buyer’s operational performance.