Experience

Publications

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• Systems-savvy selling, interpersonal identification with customers, and the sales manager’s motivational paradox: a constructivist grounded theory approach

  Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

  This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects. Keywords: incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, systems thinking, structuration, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal identity

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• Systems-savvy selling, interpersonal identification with customers, and the sales manager’s motivational paradox: a constructivist grounded theory approach

  Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

  This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects. Keywords: incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, systems thinking, structuration, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal identity

• Sales Technology Orientation, Information Effectiveness, and Sales Performance

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management

  Earned the 2007 James M. Comer as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management theory and methods. Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process-model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We develop and test the model with data collected from the sales force of a major consumer packaged goods company. The results indicate that a salesperson’s technology orientation has a direct impact on internal role performance and it affects performance with customers through a double-mediated mechanism involving the effective use of information and smart selling behaviors (planning and adaptive selling). Sales managers can influence sales technology orientation by providing better internal technology support, considering technology orientation along with customer’s approval of technology in account assignments, and understanding the probability of negative effects through a salesperson’s experience. In our sample, salesperson experience correlates with age, suggesting a “generation gap” effect on sales technology orientation.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• Systems-savvy selling, interpersonal identification with customers, and the sales manager’s motivational paradox: a constructivist grounded theory approach

  Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

  This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects. Keywords: incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, systems thinking, structuration, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal identity

• Sales Technology Orientation, Information Effectiveness, and Sales Performance

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management

  Earned the 2007 James M. Comer as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management theory and methods. Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process-model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We develop and test the model with data collected from the sales force of a major consumer packaged goods company. The results indicate that a salesperson’s technology orientation has a direct impact on internal role performance and it affects performance with customers through a double-mediated mechanism involving the effective use of information and smart selling behaviors (planning and adaptive selling). Sales managers can influence sales technology orientation by providing better internal technology support, considering technology orientation along with customer’s approval of technology in account assignments, and understanding the probability of negative effects through a salesperson’s experience. In our sample, salesperson experience correlates with age, suggesting a “generation gap” effect on sales technology orientation.

• Sales Technology

  Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management

  This chapter reviews the current literature on sales technology (including sales force automation and customer relationship management software as well as a range of hardware tools used by salespeople) and discusses opportunities for future research. The chapter highlights issues related to the dynamic nature of sales technology and its pervasive influence on the firm. It also notes why the topic warrants more attention from both scholars and managers.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• Systems-savvy selling, interpersonal identification with customers, and the sales manager’s motivational paradox: a constructivist grounded theory approach

  Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

  This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects. Keywords: incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, systems thinking, structuration, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal identity

• Sales Technology Orientation, Information Effectiveness, and Sales Performance

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management

  Earned the 2007 James M. Comer as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management theory and methods. Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process-model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We develop and test the model with data collected from the sales force of a major consumer packaged goods company. The results indicate that a salesperson’s technology orientation has a direct impact on internal role performance and it affects performance with customers through a double-mediated mechanism involving the effective use of information and smart selling behaviors (planning and adaptive selling). Sales managers can influence sales technology orientation by providing better internal technology support, considering technology orientation along with customer’s approval of technology in account assignments, and understanding the probability of negative effects through a salesperson’s experience. In our sample, salesperson experience correlates with age, suggesting a “generation gap” effect on sales technology orientation.

• Sales Technology

  Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management

  This chapter reviews the current literature on sales technology (including sales force automation and customer relationship management software as well as a range of hardware tools used by salespeople) and discusses opportunities for future research. The chapter highlights issues related to the dynamic nature of sales technology and its pervasive influence on the firm. It also notes why the topic warrants more attention from both scholars and managers.

• The Embedded Sales Force: Connecting Buying and Selling Organizations

  Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing

  Business-to-business marketing firms are increasingly focusing on building long-term partnering relationships with key customers. Salespeople are often responsible for managing these relationships. To be effective as relationship managers, salespeople need to be embedded in both their firm’s and customers’ organizations. They need to have extensive knowledge of their customers’ business and also know and be able to leverage their firm’s resources to develop offerings tailored to their customers’ needs. Their companies and sales managers need to use different approaches to manage and support salespeople in this new role. In this paper, we examine some issues affecting the interfaces between elements of the embedded sales force and suggest some directions for future research and methods for examining these issues.

• The Pursuit of Excellence in Process Thinking and Customer Relationship Management

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management,

  Earned the 2010 Marvin Jolson Award as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management practice. It is deduced from evolutionary economics theory that the first and foremost priority in customer relationship management improvement is to identify, recruit and train process thinking excellence. A method of measuring process thinking excellence is presented. The paper also proposes a method and metric that the excellent process thinkers in sales management can use in pursuing CRM best practice excellence.

• Making Sales Technology Effective

  Journal of Marketing

  Earned the 2008 Excellence in Research Award from the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group as the best paper published in 2007. Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies (STs; e.g., customer relationship management, sales automation tools) to improve sales force effectiveness and efficiency. However, the results expected from ST investments are often not achieved. This article proposes relationship-forging tasks that are critical to the link between ST use and key aspects of salesperson performance (i.e., a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers and administrative performance). The authors evaluate relationship-forging tasks in the context of a model that considers the antecedents and consequences of three different uses of ST: accessing, analyzing, and communicating information. In general, the results of a field study, which is analyzed using block-recursive structural equation modeling, support the relationship-forging theory and show that relationship-forging tasks predict 57% of the variance in a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. The findings also support hypotheses that using ST either to analyze or to communicate information has mediated positive effects on a salesperson’s relationship-building performance with customers. However, a salesperson’s use of ST to analyze information has negative influences on administrative performance, creating an unexpected trade-off for sales and marketing managers.

• Interrelations among Key Aspects of the Organizational Procurement Process

  International Journal of Research in Marketing

  For decades, there has been research on specific buying approaches and procedures used by organizational customers. Yet, there has been only limited effort to conceptualize the key higher order constructs that characterize organizational buying as a process. It is therefore useful to evaluate the simultaneous interrelationships among different aspects of the overall procurement process and how they vary with characteristics of the purchase situation. This research addresses these issues. We draw on structural equation modeling techniques and use a sample of 636 purchases to develop and test a parsimonious integrative model of interrelationships among key aspects of the procurement process. In general, our results support our model of the procurement process, including relationships among purchase importance, extensiveness of choice set, buyer power, reliance on procedural controls, a proactive focus on long-term strategic issues, search for information, and the use of formal analytical tools.

• Strategic Account Management: Conceptualizing, Integrating, and Extending the Domain from Fluid to Dedicated Accounts

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

  This paper proposes a conceptualization of strategic account management that integrates and builds upon several related literatures (e.g. key account management, national account management, major account management, large account management). It proposes that the extant literature is myopic in defining strategic accounts—almost exclusively emphasizing account teams with dedicated members (i.e., “dedicated” teams). However, in practice, there are several examples of strategic account teams that are formed with dynamic membership. This paper refers to such teams as “fluid accounts,” and proposes that dedicated and fluid accounts can be viewed as a continuum. Two dominant factors driving success of such accounts are proposed—the nature of the account’s needs and the pattern of economic returns—to serve as a simple heuristic to help advance scholarship in the area. Finally, this research provides general guidelines on how to evaluate the performance of strategic account teams.

• On Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Augmented Technology Use in Business-to-Business Sales Contexts

  Journal of Business Research

  Business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use a portfolio of technology tools to augment their performance of tasks. Using data from two sales forces for large multi-national consumer goods firms, this study demonstrates that applying different measures of technology use yields different estimates on returns, even for bivariate correlations among measures and constructs. Thus, given differences at a bivariate level, for the typically more complex multivariate model specifications of sales technology use, resulting parameter estimates can be misleading. Researchers can lower the resulting bias by appropriate alignments among theory (conceptualization) and measurements. This research argues that a holistic measure of sales technology (ST) use (a whole) does not equate to the sum of different types of uses (intermediate measures such as using technology to access, analyze, and communicate information) or the sum of different technology tools (the individual parts). Findings indicate that outcomes differ depending on how technology use is conceptualized and measured.

• The Four Faces of the Hispanic Consumer: An Acculturation-Based Segmentation

  Journal of Business Research

  This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.

• Customer Business Development: Identifying and Responding to Buyer-Implied Information Preferences

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Customer business development (CBD) transforms the selling function from ‘pushing products’ towards creating value by developing the business customer’s business. For key accounts, CBD salespeople align their customer relationship management tasks of planning, selling, and implementing solutions to best integrate customer needs with the seller’s strategic account management goals. A vital process mechanism involves the salesperson’s observations of their business buyer’s tendencies to favor solutions steeped in information characterized here as either market-centered or cost-centered. Findings show that CBD salespeople use signals from buyer commitments to identify and adapt selling behaviors (relationship-forging tasks) to achieve relational and financial objectives. To align with market-centered preferences, CBD salespeople share information about the buyer’s market and propose plans for market development. In contrast, to align with cost-centered preferences, CBD salespeople focus on coordinating interfirm activities. While cost-centered adaptations yield expected positive financial returns, interestingly, market-centered adaptations negatively impact on the seller’s financial returns.

• Systems-savvy selling, interpersonal identification with customers, and the sales manager’s motivational paradox: a constructivist grounded theory approach

  Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

  This article combines a constructivist grounded theory approach with a focus on structuration theory to propose a new mental model for understanding motivation in the context of solving complex problems in contemporary business-to-business (B2B) settings. This study uses the interpretative tradition of qualitative research to conduct in-depth interviews of 24 B2B sales professionals and subsequently analyze their lived experiences. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation stems attitudinally from a need to foster an identity of helping customers, introducing a concept called “interpersonal identification” with customers. That identity motivates the development of more cognitively intense sales proposals using a more holistic proposal development process – referred to herein as “systems-savvy selling.” While interpersonal relationships have long been components of B2B relationships, this study challenges laypeople’s stereotypes of salespeople who use interpersonal relationships to improve business outcomes. Instead, systems-savvy selling helps salespeople build interpersonal relationships and use business outcomes as feedback to strengthen interpersonal relationships and their identification with customers. Unexpectedly, it also finds that dual-role sales managers, who have roles both in selling and managing, confront a paradox of self versus others when managing systems-savvy selling processes. By sampling within an industry in which the research team benefits from significant expertise, the constructivist grounded theory approach relying on semistructured, in-depth interviews used herein leverages the research team’s expertise while controlling for industry-level effects. Keywords: incentives, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, systems thinking, structuration, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal identity

• Sales Technology Orientation, Information Effectiveness, and Sales Performance

  Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management

  Earned the 2007 James M. Comer as the best paper contributing to selling and sales management theory and methods. Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process-model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We develop and test the model with data collected from the sales force of a major consumer packaged goods company. The results indicate that a salesperson’s technology orientation has a direct impact on internal role performance and it affects performance with customers through a double-mediated mechanism involving the effective use of information and smart selling behaviors (planning and adaptive selling). Sales managers can influence sales technology orientation by providing better internal technology support, considering technology orientation along with customer’s approval of technology in account assignments, and understanding the probability of negative effects through a salesperson’s experience. In our sample, salesperson experience correlates with age, suggesting a “generation gap” effect on sales technology orientation.

• Sales Technology

  Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management

  This chapter reviews the current literature on sales technology (including sales force automation and customer relationship management software as well as a range of hardware tools used by salespeople) and discusses opportunities for future research. The chapter highlights issues related to the dynamic nature of sales technology and its pervasive influence on the firm. It also notes why the topic warrants more attention from both scholars and managers.

• The Embedded Sales Force: Connecting Buying and Selling Organizations

  Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing

  Business-to-business marketing firms are increasingly focusing on building long-term partnering relationships with key customers. Salespeople are often responsible for managing these relationships. To be effective as relationship managers, salespeople need to be embedded in both their firm’s and customers’ organizations. They need to have extensive knowledge of their customers’ business and also know and be able to leverage their firm’s resources to develop offerings tailored to their customers’ needs. Their companies and sales managers need to use different approaches to manage and support salespeople in this new role. In this paper, we examine some issues affecting the interfaces between elements of the embedded sales force and suggest some directions for future research and methods for examining these issues.

• Commitment to Technological Change, Sales Force Intelligence Norms, and Sales Performance,

  Industrial Marketing Management

  Despite increasing interest in sales technology investments, companies continue to struggle with getting their salespeople to use these expensive technologies. In this context, two under-researched issues warrant attention. First, although sales technology represents a continuous source of change, little is known about why salespeople commit to technology-induced changes. Second, knowledge on whether sales force intelligence norms play a role into translating use of sales technology to performance gains is remarkably sparse. To address these gaps, this study develops a conceptual framework that explores the linear and non-linear effects of commitment to technological change (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance) on sales technology infusion, and, in turn, on two key outcomes (i.e., customer-oriented selling and sales performance). Our framework also advances knowledge on how sales force intelligence norms (i.e., analytical sales processes and knowledge sharing with customers) moderate the relationships between sales technology infusion and key outcomes. Analysis is done using multilevel structural equation modelling on a sample of 303 salespeople nested within 22 firms. Findings support the view that the three components of commitment are distinct, with some counter-intuitive results. Specifically, affective commitment does not exert a significant positive influence as expected; yet, normative commitment does. In contrast, while lower levels of continuance commitment reduce infusion, higher levels have positive effects, thus depicting a U-shaped effect. Finally, sales technology infusion influences both key outcomes – and findings support the importance of fostering sales force intelligence norms. Implications of the study are discussed.