Is it navigation, networking, coordination … or what? A multidisciplinary review of influences on the intraorganizational dimension of the sales role and performance

Abstract

Despite much practical and empirical attention over five-plus decades, our understanding of the sales role remains limited. This is particularly true as it relates to the universe of behaviors and activities a salesperson must engage in to successfully perform his or her work. This article begins from the premise that a large part of the reason this problem persists is that, for far too long, the locus of sales research has been too overtly focused on the “customer” (i.e., the “externally directed”) and not enough on the “intraorganizational dimension of the sales role” (IDSR). Ten streams of research that stand to potentially deepen our understanding of the IDSR are reviewed in a compare-and-contrast, synthetic manner. Work reviewed includes research from the marketing and management literature, broadly defined. Nearly three dozen microlevel research ideas and discrete avenues for further exploration of the IDSR are offered as the manuscript progresses, including the development of a “Top 20, high priority” future research directions list. The article concludes by highlighting several limitations and shortcomings and offering several bold macrolevel ideas for high-upside, pressing directions for future work on the IDSR.

Keywords:

• sales
• selling
• salesperson
• internal
• intraorganizational
• IDSR
• performance

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the special issue editors and the knowledgeable reviewers for their helpful comments, suggestions, and patience with this manuscript – and my writing style. Thanks also to Daniel Bradbury for his assistance copyediting the final revision. Importantly, profound thanks should go to two other individuals: (1) Randy Veljovic, my mentor in my time in sales at Hewlett-Packard, who first turned me on to the notion of the IDSR and its importance to the sales role, and (2) my doctoral dissertation chair, Donald W. Barclay, a former salesperson and sales manager at IBM, who encouraged and guided me as I began work in this area two decades ago.

Notes

1. I fully appreciate the disservice it does to lump distinct and proud areas of scholarship together into broad “buckets.” This indeed weighed heavily on my decision to aggregate the management, strategy, organizational behavior, leadership, and applied/industrial psychology literature into the single sweeping category of “management.” However, with 10 different streams of research to review that may potentially be germane to the IDSR, I felt some form of logical, organizing mechanism for proceeding was necessary. Hence, the comprehensive literature review I undertake in this article contains just two broad groupings, the “marketing” and “management” literature, however imperfect this might be.

2. See Moncrief and Marshall (2005) and Plouffe, Holmes, and Beuk (2013) for a more detailed treatment and characterization of the various stages and steps of this type of process-based framework of selling.

3. Twenty promising future research (FR) directions pertaining to the IDSR will henceforth be denoted with the following short-form convention as the manuscript progresses (FR₁, FR₂ … FR₂₀). At the conclusion of the article, Table 2 is then introduced as a summary of those “Top 20” future research ideas and directions on the IDSR.

4. See Kidwell et al. (2011) for an overview of this issue and potential conceptual and measurement-related workarounds.

5. See also future research (FR) ideas in Table 2 with the * designation.