The purpose of this study was to examine the impact demographic variables of gender and sales experience have on the performance of business‐to‐business (B2B) sales professionals. If a deeper understanding can be established of how gender and sales experience variables relate to B2B sales performance, human resource development (HRD) and human performance improvement (HPI) professionals can use these indicators during the hiring and selection process. This article reports findings of the study and offers implications to the field of HRD and HPI.

Th e development of pragmatic predictors of sales force performance typically focuses on factors such as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, performancebased compensation, selection and training procedures, personality characteristics such as extroversion, and job satisfaction (Baldauf, Cravens, & Piercy, 2001;Frino, 2010). DeCarlo, Rody, and DeCarlo (1999) concluded that "incorporating culture as a moderating factor into global models of management practices allows easier prediction of expected behaviors in other cultures than examining many idiosyncratic models" (p. 2). Th e resulting correlations are typically weak and the conclusion is often drawn that there are too many auto-correlated variables preventing investigators from identifying discrete and signifi cant relationships (Churchill, Ford, Hartley, & Walker, 1985). Autocorrelation is the cross-correlation of a variable with itself. Informally, it is the similarity between observations as a function of the time separation between them.Salesperson performance and sales performance, in general, are topics of great interest in the sales management research fi eld (Jaramillo, Mulki, & Marshall, 2005) due to their direct infl uence on organizational profi tability. Similarly, in the intercultural Identifying antecedents of salesperson performance is a long-standing objective in the sales management research fi eld. The purpose of this article is to outline how the practical understanding of, and the willingness to embrace, sales employees' cultural value-systems adds value while considering performance drivers, individualistic versus collectivistic values, and performance outcomes. The cultural dimensions under consideration, individualism and collectivism, cannot be approached as a dichotomy. As is the case for all cultural dimensions, they represent a continuum and not absolutes. In this study, the work preferences and predispositions of participants were compared using an international data set.Respondents were culturally classifi ed based on research (i.e., Americans and Australians as individualists and Japanese and South Koreans as collectivists). Specifi cally, it was found that individualists were less attached to their current work situation; collectivists indicated less work/family confl ict; and individualists valued independent work more while collectivists valued deciding work time. This is important because of the need to understand how to eff ectively connect with the values of people to encourage positive performance outcomes. The reality is that value holds diff ering degrees of emphasis; the performance formula is the theoretical framework to guide this research. The implications of the results for sales management professionals are discussed.

This research examined the impact of a didactic and experiential sales training based on empathy on medical salespeople's self‐reported capacity for empathy. The study used a non‐equivalent, post‐test‐only quasi‐experimental design by comparing the capacity for empathy of an experimental group (n = 66) and a control group (n = 26). A Mann‐Whitney test showed no difference between the two groups. Managerial implications are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

During the past three decades, the term employee engagement has attracted considerable interest within the management literature. Defined as “a distinct and unique construct that consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that is associated with individual role performance” (Saks, 2006, p. 602), its popularity stems from early claims by practitioners and consulting firms. Having an engaged workforce may be a key competitive advantage to organizations that employ strategic resources to develop and maintain the engagement of their employees (Macey & Schneider, ; Shuck & Wollard, ).

There are significant opportunities for sales organizations to ensure their managers can articulate the company's strategic rationale for organizational decisions. In this study, we explore the interplay between strategic alignment, generational cohorts, and organizational agility. An organization's strategy has been linked to strong organizational performance as well as the ability to implement organizational changes by aligning people, processes, and decisions. (Lorange & Vancil, 1977; Kaplan, 2005). For leaders, the strategy of an organization is usually linked to building a competitive advantage, improving operational efficiency, and increasing sales revenue (Cascella, 2002; Wunder, 2005; Oh & Pinsonneault, 2007; Kunnathur & Shi, 2001). Essentially, for sales organizations agility should be considered the “ability to detect and seize market opportunities with speed and surprise” (Cao & Dowlatshahi, 2005). For the purposes of this article, in which we examine whether there is a relationship between strategic alignment and organizational agility among different generations in the sales organizations, the term organizational agility is defined as “the ability for the workforce to respond, through execution, to ongoing organizational changes” (Wischnevsky, 2004).