Understanding salespeople's resistance to, and acceptance and leadership of customer-driven change

Giovannetti, Marta; Sharma, Arun; Cardinali, Silvio; Cedrola, Elena; Rangarajan, Deva

doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2022.10.021

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…We see the findings supporting the research method; we obtained results similar to previous research. These findings are similar to those of Rangarajan et al (2021), Flaherty and Schroeder (2022) and Giovannetti et al (2022). Some interesting results also emerge.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

“…The results suggested continued resistance to digitalization in personal selling and sales management, supported by earlier research (Giovannetti et al , 2022). However, the more interesting result was the resistance of customers to digitalization.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 73%

“…The discussion of permanent changes follows the research in the area we discussed in previous sections. The increase in digitalization has been discussed by Rangarajan et al (2021), Flaherty and Schroeder (2022) and Giovannetti et al (2022).…”

Section: Permanent Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They suggested that the sales process is evolving, and firms need to increase customer support, address salespeople’s and customers’ resistance to change, understand the impact of technology on salespeople/customers, enhance the training and development of salespeople and create an adaptive salesforce. Giovannetti et al (2022) focus on individual, management and organizational perceptions of customer-driven changes and their permanence. This approach to focus on customer-driven changes during the pandemic and the need to view changes as temporary or permanent has also been highlighted by Zahoor et al (2022).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The review of these articles suggests that researchers have provided several trends and recommendations. However, only three articles focused on and comprehensively examined the trends and recommendations for personal selling and sales management and COVID-19 (Rangarajan et al , 2021; Giovannetti et al , 2022; Flaherty and Schroeder, 2022). The other research either examined a single issue and highlighted trends/recommendations, or the trends/recommendations were an outcome of research that did not focus on personal selling and sales management and COVID-19.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Understanding the enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic

Giovannetti,

Sharma,

Rangarajan

et al. 2023

JBIM

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Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has led to major sales strategy and process changes as many interactions migrated from face-to-face to virtual environments. The nature of the interactions changed, and sales firms, the sales function and salespeople created new processes to excel in virtual environments. As sales processes evolve further, this paper aims to focus on understanding the enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes. In addition, this study seeks to understand the characteristics of enduring shifts and how they are distinct from temporary shifts. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the sales organizations and salespeople over the period from the start of the pandemic to early 2022. The authors interviewed 66 sales professionals from different countries and industries to better understand the temporary and enduring shifts in sales strategy and processes, adopting ad inductive and narrative approach. Findings There are four major findings. First, four key themes emerged: increased digitalization, resistance to digitalization, sales process changes and sales organization transformation. Second, changes are classified as temporary, permanent and accelerated changes. Third, some proposed changes were not supported. Finally, five findings were found that were not discussed in previous literature. Originality/value This paper finds distinctive findings that offer additional valuable insights that connect to and extend existing literature. These include emerging themes, classification shifts, unsupported proposed changes and unique findings.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 73%