Salesperson behavior aimed at improving internal company response to customer requests has received little attention in the industrial marketing literature in comparison to external, customer-directed behaviors. In this study, the phenomenon of “salesperson navigation” (SpN) is developed within the context of a research model of selected antecedents and boundary-conditions that influence a primary form of navigational behavior, or “exploratory navigation”. The research model's utility in predicting sales performance is tested empirically with data from two Fortune 500 sales forces. The findings show that the traits of competitiveness and expert power significantly enhance the salesperson's propensity to engage in exploratory navigation behavior. Exploratory navigation, in turn, is found to have a significant and positive association with salesperson job performance, contingent upon specific boundary conditions within the salesperson's own organization (i.e., sales management support and internal competitive climate). The article concludes by offering sales researchers and industrial marketing managers implications derived from the study as well as directions for further work.
Interest in the sales role and the management of the sales function has seen an increase in both academic (e.g., Franke and Park, 2006 and McFarland et al., 2006) and managerial audiences (e.g., Stevens and Kinni, 2007 and Stewart, 2006). Despite this renewed emphasis on sales, research has lagged in its ability to shed sufficient light on the drivers of sales performance at the individual level of analysis. Typical studies explain a relatively modest 10-to-20% of the variance in salesperson performance (Churchill et al., 1985, Rich et al., 1999 and Vinchur et al., 1998). Further, if one considers research examining behavioral determinants of salesperson job performance, the field has had an almost exclusive focus on the salesperson's “externally-directed” behavior — how the salesperson acts and what strategies and tactics he/she employs in dealing with customers and prospects. Even within this context, there is little-to-no consensus amongst scholars or supporting empirical work in the industrial marketing literature to definitively show that any one such externally-directed selling perspective is superior to another, or that different types of sales skills may actually be required for different types of selling contexts (Cron et al., 2005, Franke and Park, 2006 and Vinchur et al., 1998).
This work begins from the premise that the “internally-directed” dimension of the sales role – salesperson behaviors and job functioning inside one's own organization – has an important influence on salesperson performance. This is consistent with some early perspectives on the sales role (Walker et al., 1977 and Weitz, 1981) as well as with practitioner and anecdotal accounts (Rasmusson, 1999 and Stevens and Kinni, 2007). However, other than a few isolated conceptual pieces (e.g., Sujan, 1999 and Weitz and Bradford, 1999), the sales literature has not explicitly paid much attention to the internally-directed dimension of the sales job or the drivers of such behavior (Williams & Plouffe, 2007). The broad phenomenon of interest in this research is labeled salesperson navigation (or SpN, Plouffe & Barclay, 2007). It describes the act of a salesperson purposefully exploring their own organization to interact with key others. These key others may have resources, decision-making authority, and/or the ability to shape policy in the salesperson's favor, all of which could be important influences on the salesperson's ultimate success in dealing with customers and prospects.
The specific goal of this paper is to empirically demonstrate the significance of one form of navigational behavior – “exploratory navigation” (as articulated by Plouffe & Barclay, 2007, pp. 531–532) – on salesperson performance, as well as to explore selected individual-level antecedents to this behavior. In terms of antecedents, we focus on some commonly-studied salesperson traits (e.g., competitiveness. Brown et al., 1998 and Harris et al., 2005) and characteristics (e.g., interpersonal power. Busch and Wilson, 1976 and Comer, 1984). A secondary objective is to simultaneously explore whether specific characteristics of the sales context might act as boundary conditions on navigation. From a managerial standpoint, the expected utility of this research is two-fold: (i) helping sales managers better understand an overlooked salesperson competency (i.e., internal behaviors) which might, for example, enable better hiring decisions, while also (ii) helping industrial salespeople themselves better understand the types of behaviors which might underlie exemplary sales performance.
The balance of the paper is organized as follows. First, since the notion of salesperson navigation is relatively new, a review of relevant literature is undertaken to place the concept within the broader context of work on salesperson traits and performance. Next, the research model and hypotheses driving the study are explicated. The model is then tested using both primary and archival data collected from two Fortune 500 sales organizations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings, their implications for sales management research and marketing practice, and directions for future work in this area.
