The coordination strategies of high-performing salespeople: internal working relationships that drive success

Abstract

The authors fill a gap in the salesperson performance literature by exploring the process that salespeople follow in coordinating the activities of ad hoc team members during high-opportunity customer engagements in the business market. In a two-phase study, the authors conduct depth interviews with salespeople and survey sales managers from a Fortune-100 company to identify the processes involved in the coordination of expertise. In Phase I, analysis of qualitative data reveals that higher-performing salespeople are more likely to (1) consider relational as well as technical skills when matching team members to customer requirements, (2) attract their preferred experts to the team, including a member to perform the project manager role, and (3) define the appropriate time in the sales cycle to initiate contact with the customer and deploy the team to the customer organization. Adopting a social network perspective in Phase II, the reputation of a salesperson's internal working relationships and, to a lesser extent, the diversity and strength of their relationship ties are central in explaining effective coordination of expertise. In turn, coordination of expertise is linked to salesperson performance.

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

“…The predictive capacity of the model was calculated from the classification table in SPSS output. An improvement of 25% in predicting ability will indicate that the model is statistically significant and useful (Schwab, 2003). Our model exceeded this criterion clearly as the predictive capacity of the model was 63.0%, which is 50% better than by chance alone.…”

“…However, collecting data in a single firm severely impacts generalization of the results. On the other hand, the organization-level variables such as size, culture, and management style do not affect the results (Steward et al, 2009).…”

“…For instance, in 2005, half of the surveyed 200 executives at Fortune 1000 companies reported only modest benefits from intense customer collaboration, and one quarter has lost money (Hancock et al, 2005). From the customer's point view, it is free for the customer to explore new ideas as solution providers are offering access to their expertise (Möller, 2006;Steward et al, 2009). One of executives at the sponsoring company (i16) states that customer's internal development is increasingly done through the solution salespeople.…”

“…Compared to other types of regressions, in MNL there is no need for independent variables to be statistically independent from each other, although multicollinearity is assumed to be relatively low (Menard, 2002;Schwab, 2003). The model will alert high standardized error estimates for b coefficients, higher than 2.0, if multicollinearity is too high and the results are no longer reliable (Schwab, 2003). In our study, standardized errors in independent variables were all below 0.4, suggesting no substantial signs of multicollinearity or other numerical problems.…”

“…Our model exceeded this criterion clearly as the predictive capacity of the model was 63.0%, which is 50% better than by chance alone. We also tested the model with the maximum by chance criterion (Schwab, 2003). This means that we compare our model to a test model, which predicts that every single lead is canceled.…”