As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a large B2B firm, the authors investigate how customers’ integration of an online channel affects salesperson–customer relationships. The results show that customer online channel integration leads to a 7% increase in quarterly customer gross margins, with 28% of a customer's sales volume shifting online, but only a 9% reduction in face-to-face sales transaction meetings relative to the number of meetings before the online channel integration. Salespeople continue to hold a substantial number of face-to-face meetings to handle transactions and engage in other activities with customers that integrate the online channel more than would be expected, given the proportion of sales volume that those customers shift online. Relatedly, customer integration of the online channel enhances the quality of salesperson–customer interaction within those relationships, reducing products sold at a loss and increasing the breadth of product categories sold. This research also identifies important contingency factors regarding online channel integration, including that its effectiveness when use is highly synchronized with face-to-face sales transaction meetings can lead to an even greater increase in customer gross margins of about 16%.

This article presents an in-depth interview with Chad Albrecht, Principal Emeritus and longtime sales compensation lead at ZS, focusing on best practices and evolving strategies in sales force incentive compensation. Drawing from decades of consulting experience and insights from academic literature, Albrecht outlines practical frameworks for optimizing pay mix, metric selection, payout curves, and compensation frequency. The discussion highlights the challenges and trade-offs faced by firms in designing incentive systems that are strategically aligned, motivational, and fiscally responsible. In addition to offering tactical advice for practitioners, the article identifies several underexplored areas for future academic research, including ROI measurement, performance distribution modeling, and behavioral responses to compensation design. The conversation underscores the need for closer collaboration between industry and academia to build more effective and evidence-based incentive systems.

Many business-to-business sales firms use automated lead nurturing (ALN) systems, which track leads’ online behavior and nurture them through personalized content. ALN software providers claim that ALN improves lead conversion, but whether this benefit materializes is unclear. Therefore, this research examines ALN’s effect across one qualitative and three quantitative studies. The findings indicate that ALN can provide valuable information to both sellers and leads and thereby improve the quality of salesperson–lead interactions, which in turn drives lead conversion. On average, ALN increases the probability of lead conversion between 0 (Studies 1, 3) and 23 (Study 2) percentage points. However, these effects strongly depend on a lead’s sales cycle length, expected sales volume, and preexisting relationship with the seller. Thereby, this article conducts the first rigorous “fact check” of ALN and provides evidence that understanding the effect of ALN requires a contingency view. The findings also call on practitioners to change their current practices related to ALN. Rather than accepting industry claims at face value, practitioners should verify whether ALN improves lead conversion in their specific context. Furthermore, they should employ ALN particularly for leads where information asymmetry persists and is unlikely to be resolved through other, more costly means.

Many business-to-business sales firms use automated lead nurturing (ALN) systems, which track leads' online behavior and nurture them through personalized content. ALN software providers claim that ALN improves lead conversion, but whether this benefit materializes is unclear. Therefore, this research examines ALN's effect across one qualitative and three quantitative studies. The findings indicate that ALN can provide valuable information to both sellers and leads and thereby improve the quality of salesperson-lead interactions, which in turn drives lead conversion. On average, ALN increases the probability of lead conversion between 0 (Studies 1, 3) and 23 (Study 2) percentage points. However, these effects strongly depend on a lead's sales cycle length, expected sales volume, and preexisting relationship with the seller. Thereby, this article conducts the first rigorous "fact check" of ALN and provides evidence that understanding the effect of ALN requires a contingency view. The findings also call on practitioners to change their current practices related to ALN. Rather than accepting industry claims at face value, practitioners should verify whether ALN improves lead conversion in their specific context. Furthermore, they should employ ALN particularly for leads where information asymmetry persists and is unlikely to be resolved through other, more costly means.

This research addresses a challenge within cross-national surveys of salespeople and sales managers: systematic differences between respondents from different countries in their interpretation of response categories associated with survey items measuring a construct of interest. As a result of these discrepancies in interpretation, analyses based on uncorrected survey responses may yield misleading results. The authors mathematically demonstrate the issue and then, drawing on the literature in education and political science, demonstrate a potential solution, the use of anchoring vignettes, which possesses substantial appeal in contexts where a researcher is interested in comparing construct means across contexts where intergroup differences would otherwise make such comparisons problematic. The authors use the proposed method on data from a cross-national survey of 1,051 salespeople and 163 sales managers across three countries (Brazil, Japan, and the United Kingdom) to evaluate self-assessments and upward assessments of a sales manager's drive. The findings highlight the importance of correcting for systematic differences in survey responses driven by cross-national differences, especially when the goal is to compare construct means. Further, the authors demonstrate the value of anchoring vignettes concerning several analytical goals relevant to academics and practitioners.

This research takes an Upper Echelon (UE) disruption-adaptation perspective to understand influence of customer-related executive leadership turnover (CrELT) on firm performance. The authors draw on customer-related executive exits at U.S. public firms between 2004 and 2016. CrELT measures presence (or absence) of annual turnover of one or more executives, accounting for changes (due to exits) to customer-related organization's formal representation in the top management. We show that CrELT hurts firm performance as it disrupts the functioning of customer-related positions that hurts buyer–seller relationships. We find that CrELT's association with firm performance is worsened in firm-level environments characterized by voluntary peer exits but is attenuated in firms with greater degree of debt to assets ratio. All else equal, relative to no such turnover, CrELT, in a given firm-year hurts firm performance as the drop in ROA may range from −0.02% to −0.19%. For a firm in S&P Global, with an annual net income of $3.024 billion in 2021, CrELT should result in a loss of over $28 million.

Existing research treats sales performance as a series of discrete, independent events rather than a series of sales attempts with intertemporal spillover across these attempts. This research examines whether there are systematic short-term trends (“momentum”) in sales performance. To do so, the authors use the clumpiness approach to examine the existence of sales momentum in a high-frequency call-level data set obtained from two call centers of a large European firm. They further investigate the effect of positive (negative) momentum, or the positive (negative) deviation from the long-term expected performance on subsequent sales performance. Exploiting the differences in the social environment of the call centers, the authors find that the social working environment mitigates the harmful effect of negative momentum and sustains positive momentum. Further, they demonstrate that calls made midday, early-week, and late-week boost performance by mitigating the adverse effects of negative momentum. The findings suggest that monitoring sales performance can help managers detect momentum and use timely interventions to enhance sales productivity. Managers can also leverage momentum by creating a more social working environment to optimize overall salesperson performance.

The ready availability of information about purchase options has shifted the point at which customers make purchase decisions; they often come into the sales interaction knowing what they want (i.e., have higher preference certainty). Yet companies continue to base their selling strategies, spending billions of dollars, on a model of the customer decision process that is predicated on low preference certainty. Therefore, understanding the impact of customer preference certainty on the efficacy of the traditional selling paradigm is crucial. Through an extensive field study spanning four months across 15 different stores of a durable goods retailer and two experiments, the authors examine the consequences of this shift toward higher preference certainty for the practice of selling. Drawing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and adaptive selling, they find that a lack of consideration of the shift in customer decision making can hurt both salespeople and customers. Specifically, they find that ignoring customer preference certainty and unconditionally employing tactics that involve educating and challenging customers can have negative repercussions on purchase probability and sales revenue.

To reach new clientele, luxury brands make strategic extensions into new product categories with more accessible prices resulting in less selective retail strategies that also feature stores not directly operated by the luxury brands (non-DOS). Entering such stores entails challenges as the luxury brand steps outside its luxury environment and loses direct control of the salesperson that interacts with the end consumer. Furthermore, in a less selective non-DOS, a luxury brand's sales may get impacted due to image discrepancies in the salesperson's mind, while the luxury brand competes for the salesperson's attention. This study proposes several motivational levers that direct the efforts of a salesperson in a less selective non-DOS: the salesperson's perceived fit between the brand and the store, the level of identification with the luxury brand, and luxury sensitivity. With empirical support in a unique dataset, the authors show that a salesperson's perceived fit increases effort allocation for a luxury brand, and luxury brand identification strengthens it. Counterintuitively, the results show that a salesperson with a high level of luxury sensitivity is not predisposed to sell luxury outside a luxury environment. Finally, suggestions for performance implications are offered to luxury brand managers and retailers selling luxury brands.

The effective training of salespeople is crucial to a firm's success; there is arguably no more critical type of training than a salesperson's onboarding. In this study, the authors leverage a natural field experiment in which a firm's newly hired salespeople can undergo onboarding through either a decentralized program or a centralized program to examine the relative impact of each program. Drawing on organizational socialization theory, the authors consider whether an onboarding program that incorporates both individualized and institutionalized socialization tactics (the decentralized program) can develop salespeople into higher performers by encouraging them to take a more innovative and adaptive approach to different facets of the sales role. The findings reveal that salespeople who underwent the decentralized program achieved approximately 23.5% higher sales performance than those who underwent the centralized program. The performance benefits of the decentralized program were amplified for salespeople whose managers had a narrower span of control. In addition, these performance benefits were appreciable for those salespeople transitioning from another job but negligible for those transitioning from school. A scenario-based experiment enriches the field experiment's findings by showing evidence of the theorized mechanism underlying the sales performance benefits observed: the fostering of an innovative role orientation.

Sales force performance is predominant in the B2B marketing literature. This chapter reviews how sales force performance has been defined, operationalized and measured. By providing a typology of sales force performance along two dimensions - namely positive versus negative performance and behavioral versus outcome performance - we outline some important gaps in this body of literature and propose avenues for further research. Much emphasis is placed on contemporary topics that are managerially relevant, including team selling, sales force performance during times of change and salespeople as brand ambassadors. We also provide brief methodological notes for exploring these topics.

The revolution in information availability and the advances in novel interaction technologies have ushered in two major shifts that call into question the traditional assumptions of buyer-seller interactions. First, buyer-seller information asymmetry has greatly decreased in many interactions. Second, face-to-face communication is no longer the main format of buyer-seller interactions. In this article, the authors review empirical research on how these shifts have changed buyer-seller negotiations, an important type of buyer-seller interactions. Several insights arise from this review. First, the shifts have caused fundamental changes in buyers' and sellers' roles, power, and aspirations and information processing. Second, the shifts and these fundamental changes together cause major changes in buyer-seller interactional processes and outcomes, including (1) change in buyers' attitude and behavior, (2) change in sellers' effectiveness in interacting with buyers, and (3) change in buyer-seller interactional processes. Based on these insights, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the reexamination of existing theories and the development of new theories of buyer-seller interactions.

Conceptualized as a meta‐construct, operations‐related structural flux (ORSF) refers to appointments and exits—voluntary or involuntary—of operations‐related executives, to and from the firm. This research leverages the contingency theory perspective to show that ORSF’s influence on firm performance is contingent on contextual circumstances of such executive changes, specifically, appointments and exits—voluntary or involuntary. Examining executive turnover data from North American public firms between 2000 and 2016, the authors find that the firm‐level context of operations executives’ turnover is consequential for firm performance. On average, operations appointments are adaptive, but operations exits, including those due to both voluntary and involuntary reasons, disrupt firm performance. However, parallel effects are not evident for marketing‐ and finance‐related appointments and exits. Furthermore, our study reveals that exit of one operations executive hurts firm performance (measured in terms of Tobin’s q) by 3.3%. A post‐hoc analysis finds that firm performance of the sample firms that witness involuntary operations‐related exits (IVOpE)is, on average, 9.2% lower than that of the sample firms that do not witness IVOpE. These results indicate the outsized influence of operations‐related executives, who collectively are generally responsible for much of a firm’s budget, workforce, resources, structures, and capabilities.

Blurring roles in the front line are changing how many organizations interact with their customers. Whereas frontline employees were tasked with functional roles of service or selling, an increased competitive environment and growing customer expectations have caused a shift requiring many employees to be effective at both selling and service. The growth of sales/service ambidexterity in both practice and research has prompted more meaningful investigation of the topic. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief background of ambidexterity and positioning of the topic. We provide a discussion of the articles compiled in this special issue and the synergy across papers. We conclude with the implications of this research and avenues for future research.

The authors introduce and investigate incoming managers’ instantaneous commitment - a novel concept increasingly relevant to frontline managers. Instantaneous commitment is a type of organizational commitment that can be formed expediently on the back of incoming managers’ preexisting role/work-related factors (stakeholder connections, relationships, and skills) offering organizations guidance on managers’ stakeholder orientation. Moreover, instantaneous commitment helps organizations avoid the classic loyalty-utility dilemma, as it provides an organization-wide instantaneous approach towards better stakeholder focus while being agnostic to emotional investment (loyalty) and to calculative assessment (utility) that may take shape over time. The authors provide a parsimonious explanation of instantaneous commitment construct and differentiate it from related constructs (affective commitment and continuance commitment). We also offer an understanding of how organizations can engender instantaneous commitment among managers. Finally, we develop a conceptual framework of a set of factors - prior role/work related antecedents, stakeholder orientation consequence of instantaneous commitment, and moderating influences of individual, environmental and new role/work related factors.

The integration of diverging thought worlds of marketing and sales can have many synergistic benefits for industrial firms. However, intertwining marketing and sales in one position introduces coordination costs—costs that have, for the most part, been ignored by the existing B2B literature. The authors argue that appointment announcements of new executives to joint marketing and sales positions (M&S) puts these costs in stark relief, especially relative to new marketing-only (M) or sales-only (S) appointments' announcements. Leveraging event-study methodology and latent instruments, this research examines secondary data on over 800 executive appointment announcements, 436 of which are related to marketing and sales. The authors find that new appointments to joint M&S positions introduce hard to simultaneously balance change across diverging thought worlds that results in uncertainty and hurt firm value. Drawing on structural-contingency framework, this study finds that less formalization of tasks, represented by insider status of an appointee, can mitigate this disruption, by stabilizing structures during change. Furthermore, specialization in B2B marketing technology weakens the negative effect of announcements of joint M&S appointments, because such positions lean heavily towards sales and thus require less coordination between the two functions. However, specialization with respect to industry environment, represented by market concentration, exacerbates the disruptive effect of appointing new executives to joint M&S positions.

Negotiations today are less likely to be characterized by information asymmetry—the notion that buyers are less informed than sellers—due to the amount of information available to buyers. A number of industries have reacted to this change by shifting their attention to earning profits in aftermarkets: products and services that augment the main purchase (e.g., add-ons, insurance, financing, service and maintenance). In these aftermarkets, firms often retain an information advantage, even if information asymmetries are eliminated from the main purchase. This has given rise to an interesting setting untapped by prior research: information “symmetry” in the front end (main purchase) and information “asymmetry” in the back end (aftermarket). The authors argue that symmetry in the front end provides an opportunity to build trust, as the knowledgeable customer can verify the information disclosed by the seller. In an observational study in the automotive industry, the authors find that customers to whom the salesperson revealed the cost of a car at the beginning of the negotiation spent significantly more in the back end than others. As corroborated in subsequent studies, this effect holds only when cost is disclosed at the beginning of the negotiation and when customers can verify the cost information.

Sales research is increasingly recognizing the blending of salesperson responsibilities, the growing number of interactions involved in sales processes and activities, and the nonlinear nature of value (co)creation. This has resulted in a shift towards more holistic and systemic views to explain selling and sales related phenomena. We adopt such a view to examine broader social structures and argue that recognizing their overlapping and nested nature is important to understanding sales processes. To aid the investigation of social structure and theorizing more generally, the practice of examining levels of aggregation and theoretical abstraction is introduced. This practice can also in the framing of articles and identification of their contributions to the sales and broader literature.