Salespersons’ Information Overload: Scale Development, Validation, and its Relationship to Salesperson Job Satisfaction and Performance

Complexity of sales situation and sales lead performance: An empirical study in business-to-business company

“…From the salesperson's perspective, need for information increases as the relationships move from transactional to collaborative. At the sales force level, Hunter and Goebel (2008) found that information overload leads to weaker sales performance. We argue that the more collaboration between supplier and customers, the more information there is to deal with.…”

“…The implementation of cross-functional business processes was seen as integral in achieving competitive advantage (Storbacka et al, 2009). Hunter and Goebel (2008) mention the variety of different selling techniques as one factor adding complexity. Thus, above described structural changes in sales functions are followed by new sales activities and rapidly changing internal processes that add complexity in selling situations (Ingram, 2004).…”

“…Hunter and Goebel (2008) conclude that complexity in the sales situation, which leads to salesperson information overload, increases in a relationship-building environment, where business-to-business salespeople nowadays operate. Complexity in sales situations is found to decrease sales force performance (Hunter & Goebel, 2008;Morris et al, 1994).…”

“…We define "complexity in the sales situations" as the sales force's need to understand the ever increasing amount of customer-specific information and to link that information with supplier's rapidly changing offerings (Ingram, 2004). Hunter and Goebel (2008) conclude that complexity in the sales situation, which leads to salesperson information overload, increases in a relationship-building environment, where business-to-business salespeople nowadays operate. Complexity in sales situations is found to decrease sales force performance (Hunter & Goebel, 2008;Morris et al, 1994).…”

A human-centric integrated approach to web information search and sharing

“…The word itself has many synonyms, such as information explosion or information burden, and some derivatives, such as salesperson's information overload [2], to name a few. So what is 'information overload'?…”