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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.

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.

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.

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.

This study aims to develop and test a process model of the effect of social media use by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople on their value cocreation and cross/upselling performance. Adopting a research acquisition perspective, the authors claim that salesperson’s social media use is critical for generating social capital – an operant resource characterized by superior market knowledge, reputation and networking – which, in turn, directly and synergistically enhances value cocreation and cross/upselling outcomes.

A model is developed based on extant sales research on salesperson’s social media use and social capital theory. Data from B2B salespeople is analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that salespeople’s social media use enhances their social capital with support for direct effects on market knowledge and reputation, and indirect effect on networking. The results also show that the three aspects of social capital drive value cocreation, which enhances cross/upselling performance. Post hoc analysis shows the indirect effects of salesperson’s social media use as well as the interconnected effects of the aspects of social capital on value cocreation.

The study indicates that salespeople should be encouraged to use social media as a means for enhancing market knowledge and reputation, which can then be leveraged to build networking skills. Providing training to salespeople and coaching them on how to build their social capital is essential if organizations need to capitalize on novel ways to improve the value cocreation performance of their sales teams.

This study demonstrates how salespeople’s social media use can enhance their social capital, which, in turn, is critical for value cocreation and cross/upselling performance. The proposed framework opens opportunities for future studies to examine the role of salesperson social capital and value cocreation in B2B exchanges.

Although organizations are investing heavily in digital transformation (DT) of the sales function, implementation and exploitation at the sales force level are ongoing challenges. As sales managers serve as conduits of influence between top management and the sales force, the success of strategic initiatives, such as DT, hinges heavily on leveraging their influence to promote change adoption at the sales force level. Accordingly, this research is guided by the research question: how can sales organizations secure the buy-in of sales managers and induce their championing behaviors directed toward the sales force?. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how organizational and psychological resources influence sales managers' DT change champion through their change readiness.

Construing DT in sales as an organizational change that creates contextual job demands, the theoretical framework offers several hypotheses linking organizational and personal resources with sales managers’ change readiness and championing behaviors. The perceived impact of change is included as a moderating variable. Using data from a sample of 176 business-to-business sales managers, the hypotheses are tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The authors demonstrate that two change-related organizational resources (change communication and change mobilization) and a personal psychological resource (psychological capital) facilitate sales managers’ emotional and cognitive change readiness, which, in turn, enhances their championing behaviors toward DT initiatives. Further, the authors find that perceived change impact augments the effects of organizational and psychological resources on change readiness, thus highlighting the importance of effective positioning of the outcomes of change.

This study provides practitioners with actionable guidance on securing the buy-in of sales managers for change initiatives such as DT. Specifically, communication and mobilization are critical inducements. Managers who score high on psychological capital can be targeted as change agents. Further, the impact of change needs to be framed positively, as the resultant perceptions magnify the effects of organizational resources.

While prior research has examined salespeople’s response to change, very little is known about the antecedents of change readiness and championing behavior among sales managers. Based on the results, the authors identify theoretical and managerial implications as well as future research directions.

The main purpose of this research is to understand how the sudden shift to work from home (WFH) after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught several sales organizations underprepared and ill-equipped to combat emergent challenges. In this research, the authors provide initial evidence into how the WFH arrangement impacts salespeople and sales organizations. Specifically, this research is guided by two objectives: to understand how the shift to WFH environment is affecting salespeople, and to explore how organizations can mitigate dysfunctional effects of the shift to WFH practices and enhance salespeople’s commitment toward this new reality.

The authors did preliminary in-depth interviews with 13 executives operating in the business-to-business (B2B) space to identify themes that reflected the reality faced by B2B sales organizations when transitioning to WFH. The authors then conducted a quantitative study involving a survey with 130 B2B salespeople.

The findings from the qualitative research suggested that the WFH situation is quite different from the more traditional remote selling situations that B2B salespeople are used to. More specifically, salespeople experienced more anxiety because of the WFH situations. This finding was supported in the empirical study done by the authors where stress associated with WFH and job insecurity had a significant impact on salesperson anxiety.

The study primarily used subjective responses of salespeople with no objective measures. Furthermore, this study is cross-sectional in nature. Future research should build on the present work to understand the long-term consequences of WFH and factor in customer responses to the same. The impact of increased use of technology in the sales process will need further attention, including the sales management implication for the same.

Given the unforeseen nature of the COVID pandemic and how unprepared salespeople and sales organizations were to deal with it, this study is one of the first studies that documents the impact of WFH situations on salespeople.

This study aims to investigate the role of three customer equity drivers on customer repurchase intent in business-to-business (B2B) markets. It also explores the interconnected nature of equity drivers, specifically, the effects of brand equity and value equity on relationship equity. Further, it investigates how perceived switching costs moderates the interrelationships between customer equity drivers. The authors explore the interrelationships between the customer equity drivers in a B2B context involving commodity products in a developing market.

Data collection was done from a pool of 184 institutional customers of a lubricant brand in a developing market. The sample had representations of buyer organizations across sectors, namely, automobile, cement, metal, fertilizer, railway, defence and mining, etc. The final data were subjected to partial least squares-based structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized model.

The study found a direct effect of brand equity, and value equity on relationship equity and an indirect effect on repurchase intent, namely, relationship equity. Perceived switching cost was found to moderate the interaction between brand equity and relationship equity as well as between value equity and relationship equity. The direct effect of relationship equity on repurchase intent was also significant.

The study implies that B2B firms should ground their marketing program on these customer equity drivers, especially when dealing with commodity products. The absence of any of these drivers would be detrimental in customer retention. The study also establishes the relevance of switching cost(s) and its impact on the underlying dynamics between the different equity drivers in the context of commodity products. The customer equity drivers along with switching costs, if managed well, may become switching barriers for customers and eventually would ensure recurring revenue through repeat purchases.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that focuses on the disaggregated effect of customer equity on customer outcomes in the B2B context. Furthermore, this study investigates how perceived switching costs moderates the interrelationships between customer equity drivers in the industrial sales context in an emerging market.

The increasingly complex business-to-business (B2B) sales process necessitates that sales managers strike the right balance between appropriate resource allocation, while also maintaining the profitability of the organization. While previous research has mainly focused on how changes in the business environment pose distinct challenges to salespeople, very little research has focused on how sales managers should react to these complex situations. Drawing upon the extant sales research, this paper aims to point to a gap in the literature of how sales managers deal with the complexity associated with the sales process and deal with the same.

Methods from the grounded theory research approach were used to conduct 18 in-depth interviews with B2B sales managers. Purposive sampling was used to identify the participants.

A taxonomy of sales situations that reflects the changing complexity of the sales function and how sales managers need to orchestrate their resource allocation decisions to ensure appropriate value capture from B2B relationships emerged within the themes. This paper highlights four fundamental tenets of sales situations that account for both the complexity of the sales process and the value appropriation challenge that sales managers face.

The taxonomy will help sales managers have a better understanding of the changing complexity in the B2B sales process and help them with decisions making. Sales managers can orchestrate their resource allocation to achieve value appropriation.

This paper develops a new taxonomy of the sales situation. It unravels the changing complexity of the B2B sales process and discusses how value appropriation can be achieved by sales managers.

This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework identifies burnout as a key mediating variable and salesperson grit as a coping mechanism.

Survey data is gathered from 364 B2B salespeople and investigated using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.2.

The findings reveal adverse life events and their corresponding stress diminish a salesperson’s ability to manage customer relationships effectively through the mediators of reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Thus, negative events of a personal nature can have a significant impact on salesperson outcomes and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as job-related stress. Furthermore, results show that salesperson grit provides mixed results as a coping mechanism.

The findings indicate that practitioners should be mindful of the negative impact adverse life events can have on work-related outcomes. Organizations and sales managers must be intentional in managing relationships with their salespeople and strategic in the structure they use to manage customer relationships. Recommendations include the use of regular one-on-one meetings to open up a dialogue about work or personal issues the salesperson is experiencing and assigning multiple resources or staff to service valuable customers, thereby not relying on solitary salespeople.

Employee well-being contributes to firm value; yet, this is the first study in sales to explore the impact of adverse life events on salesperson outcomes.

Despite the prominence of ethics in mainstream marketing and sales literature, studies on the role of unethical sales practices remain sparse. As a result, we sought to fill this void by reviewing and integrating the available research on unethical sales practices.

A systematic methodology is used to review the literature. The data study covered peer-reviewed journal publications from 2008 through 2020.

Our investigation uncovered patterns (situational ethical behavior, ethical sales organizational culture, ethical leadership of salespeople, and unethical behavior). We suggest promising avenues for further research by concluding our methodological and theoretical contribution.

Today’s sales profession is continually evolving, putting increased demand on salespeople to adapt to new norms. Salespeople may be enticed to engage in unethical sales tactics in these situations, endangering not just themselves, but also their organizations and clients. This research contributes to the unique nature of ethics among sales people.

This paper proposes and empirically tests a theoretical model on how different customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), such as giving feedback and helping other customers, affect the role stress–job strain relationship among frontline employees.

Drawing from the job demands-resources model, this paper hypothesizes that some CEBs weaken the role stress–job strain relationship among frontline employees, whereas the opposite holds for other CEBs. To test these hypotheses, the study involved a survey among 279 frontline employees in 20 nursing home teams in Belgium.

The results reveal that the impact of role stress on job strain is stronger when frontline employees notice more helping behaviors among customers and weaker when frontline employees receive more customer feedback or notice that customers spread positive word of mouth about the nursing home.

This research contributes to the customer engagement and frontline employee literature by showing that CEBs can act as both job demands and job resources for frontline employees.

This paper aims to highlight the important role played by supervisory feedback on the job satisfaction experienced by salespeople. In order to address this issue, it seeks to argue that job perceptions (job challenge and job involvement) will mediate the feedback‐satisfaction linkage.

Self‐administered questionnaires were distributed to 250 retail automobile and truck salespersons working at 50 dealerships in a major Southwestern metroplex (five salespeople from each dealership were randomly selected for contact). A cluster sampling procedure was used to identify metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with at least two or more dealerships; dealerships were then randomly chosen from the MSAs. Items used to develop the variables were measured using seven‐point Likert‐type scales. Respondents' level of agreement or disagreement with each statement was assessed.

The findings suggest that supervisors could enhance the already strong link between positive feedback and job satisfaction by associating such feedback with job challenge and job involvement. Such a linkage could serve to enrich the supervisor's feedback, shifting it from the domain of simple “pats on the back” toward supervisor‐initiated development.

Some of the limitations of the paper could be that the nature of the sample makes it difficult to generalize results to salesforces in other industries. The predominance of men in these sales positions, though quite representative of the automobile industry, might obscure any gender‐related issues in feedback research.

The value of the paper is that it looks at the mediating role of job perception that has not been researched enough in the past.