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Managers must concentrate on improving salespersons' positive attitudes and self efficacy toward selling new products to develop the develop the product's performance. Managers should not also depend on normative pressure when a new product is being launched. Subjective norms lessen the positive effects of attitudes and self-efficacy.

As a sales trainer, I often confront a difficult obstacle that stands in the way of developing more effective salespeople. Too often salespeople are hindered by limiting beliefs that prevent […]

What does it take to be the type of salesperson who produces positive results year after year? Just ask any sales manager or salesperson this question. Each one will have […]

Salespeople tend to say, "I hope I earn $100k this year" or "I hope this customer gives me the sale." However, these are not goals; they are dreams. One of […]

There's never a need for more opportunities to make sales. Never. More than enough are always available. In fact, more opportunities than any company can handle. "Yeah, sure. If that's […]

Apparently, starting the sales process is just as time-consuming as closing the deal. Salespeople spend as much as 33 percent of their time tracking down contact information for prospects. SOURCE: […]

Tim was doing okay, really. He'd been selling for a few years and had managed to rack up $7 million in gross sales that particular year. But the truth was […]

A study showing that automation of salesforce is dependent upon the sales people's perception about the usefulness and accuracy of information being generated by the system.

ON A WARM AFTERNOON IN AUGUST 2004 a customer walks into the Irvine, Calif., sales office of one of the country's largest home builders and, not unexpectedly, gets the red […]

It's a hard fact of selling: Somewhere along the line, a prospect or customer will doubt whether he is getting the best possible deal from the salesperson sitting across from […]

Are you aggressive enough for sales? On the other hand, are you too aggressive? It would seem that sales--like lots of other things--is a function of balance and consistency. However, […]

What does it take to be the type of salesperson who produces positive results year after year? Just ask any sales manager or salesperson this question. Each one will have […]

Selling is a challenging profession. Throughout American history a handful of salespeople have achieved success far beyond the ordinary, and these super-high achievers all followed the same set of fundamental […]

A considerable amount of research has focused on stress in personal selling, primarily focusing on role demands. However, the issue of how a salesperson's sales behaviors relate to his or her own stress has largely been unaddressed. The author investigates felt stress in the salesperson as a consequence of using coercive sales tactics. The role of learning orientation as a coping resource is also examined. It was found that the use of coercive sales tactics (threats and promises) is associated with higher levels of felt stress. This stress, in turn, is related to lower levels of manifest influence. Learning orientation serves as a coping resource, moderating the relationship between threats and felt stress., Researchers have identified a number of serious consequences of stress among salespeople, including increased turnover, lower levels of satisfaction, and decreased performance (e.g., Behrman and Perreault 1984; Fry et al. [...]

The objective of this paper is to develop an empirical understanding of sales managers' perceptions of gray markets, that is, exclusive territory violations. We examine a number of factors that can affect these perceptions and then make recommendations about how senior management can align actions on gray markets by changing aspects of the contexts in which sales managers operate. Specifically, we develop a typology of gray markets and use the typology in conjunction with the constructs of distributor dependence and managerial incentives to make predictions regarding sales managers' positive or negative perceptions of gray markets. We test these predictions with a within-subjects, full-factorial experiment that incorporates role-playing by experienced managers. Most of the predictions are supported by the analysis and we develop recommendations based on these results involving compensation design and distributor dependence by which top management can achieve consensus within firms about managing gray markets., Consider the following situations: 1. One sales manager finds that distributors assigned to specific geographical territories frequently cross over and make sales in each others' territories, but the sales manager [...]

Job involvement is a person's psychological identification or commitment to his/her job. Job involvement is an important construct in salesforce performance research because (1) it is a relevant consequence of a salesperson's work environment and internal feelings, (2) it is a relevant antecedent of a number of important sales job outcomes, and (3) it impacts the socialization process for salespeople. Because sales jobs have changed markedly over the past decade, a salesperson's job involvement now tends to be more focused on relationships with clients and less on aspects within an organizational boundary. The most widely used measure of job involvement (Lodahl and Kejner 1965) is not occupation-specific to sales. This article outlines the development of a new scale for relationship-based salesperson job involvement utilizing rigorous assessments of reliability, validity, and dimensionality within a broad sample of practicing salespeople., Introduction Research concerning salesperson attitudes and behavior expanded rapidly in the 1990s. Interest centered on identifying relevant antecedents of important salesperson job outcomes such as job performance, job satisfaction, turnover [...]

Meeting planners are increasingly worried and frustrated over the attitudes of a new breed of hotel sales managers and salespeople. These executives are new to the job, unknowledgeable, inflexible, inexperienced and hardly, if ever, return phone calls, faxes or electronic mail. Their lack of expertise could potentially affect meetings in a negative way. Meeting planners who have been in the business for 10 or more years believe that these new sales people have become complacent because of a booming economy and the existence of a seller's market., With little experience and an order-taking approach to service, a new generation of hotel salespeople has planners frustrated - and worried about their meetings They are brand-new on the job. [...]

Sales personnel from various service industries talk about how they assess customers based on what they buy or order. These include coffee shop owners, waitresses, bartenders and shoe salespeople.

An increasing number of firms have been expanding their operations from domestic into international markets. This phenomenon has been particularly noteworthy in Hong Kong, where more and more companies are now establishing sales bases in Mainland China. A key question facing multinational managers is whether the rewards that are bestowed on Hong Kong Chinese sales personnel are appropriate for Mainland Chinese salespeople. Although salesperson from both areas possess a Chinese cultural heritage, the economic structures of the two have been distinctly different (i.e., basically a capitalistic versus socialistic orientation, respectively); the distinguishing features of their respective economies may well contribute to salespeople's holding variant reward perceptions. This article examines the perceived importance Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese salespersons place on various kinds of organizational rewards. The findings indicate that these two sales groups hold different perceptions regarding the significance of the rewards. Managerial implications are provided for firms contemplating moving into the Chinese marketplace. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

This study develops a model that consolidates knowledge involving salespeople's perceptions of their sales manager's behavior with knowledge relating to other perceptions and intentions. Relationships tested in the model indicate that the sales manager's behavior drives salespeople's attitude, lessens their perceptions of job stress, strengthens their attachment to the organization, and inhibits their desire to withdraw. Several suggestions are drawn from the results to enhance salespeople's attachment to the selling organization and retention. The findings indicate that senior sales management needs to strongly consider increasing efforts devoted to selecting, training, and supporting first-line sales managers. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The recent work of Sujan, Weitz, and Kumar (1994) brings into sharp focus two distinct goal orientations of salespeople: learning and performance. In this article, the authors make two primary contributions to this emerging topic in salesforce literature: (1) They develop and examine novel propositions that shed light on how supervisors influence the goal orientations of salespeople, and (2) They examine whether supervisors' influence on their salespeople's orientations is moderated by salesperson experience. The article's hypotheses are tested using data from salespeople in two Fortune 500 companies. The results support several of the a prior hypotheses and suggest that supervisory behaviors (as perceived by salespeople) have a significant influence on salespeople's learning and performance orientations. Furthermore, the authors obtain some support for the hypothesized moderating effect of salesperson experience. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

How many times have you been told you'd be a more successful salesperson if you were better organized? How many times have you told yourself you must organize your activities […]

"Good sales people are born, not made" This is perhaps one of the widest held beliefs among non-sales types. Just as the childhood athlete learns how to ice skate, roller […]

Most salespeople commit mistakes that affect their performance. A common mistake is thinking like a salesperson instead of a customer. More often than not, a sales representative would focus on making a sale rather than building rapport with a prospect. Even when there is a potential customer, representatives lose a sales opportunity because they forget or fail to follow up on a lead. Even worse are sales representatives who neglect their customers after making a sale. These salespeople think that selling the product is the end of their responsibility, not knowing that the customers they leave behind might lead them to other prospects.

This study compared the perceptions of the salesperson to those of his or her respective manager. In this paired comparison of matched responses, findings indicate that salespeople's evaluations of the degree of latitude they have over the sales call are significantly different from those of their managers. Salespeople perceive they are given more latitude than their managers are giving. When managers have the opportunity to interact with fewer subordinates - or interact with those subordinates over longer periods of time - these perceptual differences occur less frequently. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Introduction Organizational commitment (OC) has been the focus of many studies in the management and marketing literatures over the last 25 years. This attention is likely due to several reasons: [...]