Department of Marketing

Title

Exploratory Navigation and Salesperson Performance: Investigating Selected Antecedents and Boundary Conditions in High- Technology and Financial Services Contexts

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2010

Abstract

Salesperson behavior aimed at improving internal company response to customer requests has received little attention in the industrial marketing literature in comparison to external, customer-directed behaviors. In this study, the phenomenon of "salesperson navigation" (SpN) is developed within the context of a research model of selected antecedents and boundary-conditions that influence a primary form of navigational behavior, or "exploratory navigation". The research model's utility in predicting sales performance is tested empirically with data from two Fortune 500 sales forces. The findings show that the traits of competitiveness and expert power significantly enhance the salesperson's propensity to engage in exploratory navigation behavior. Exploratory navigation, in turn, is found to have a significant and positive association with salesperson job performance, contingent upon specific boundary conditions within the salesperson's own organization (i.e., sales management support and internal competitive climate). The article concludes by offering sales researchers and industrial marketing managers implications derived from the study as well as directions for further work. Interest in the sales role and the management of the sales function has seen an increase in both academic (e.g., Franke & Park, 2006; McFarland, Challagalla, & Shervani, 2006) and managerial audiences (e.g., Stevens & Kinni, 2007; Stewart, 2006). Despite this renewed emphasis on sales, research has lagged in its ability to shed sufficient light on the drivers of sales performance at the individual level of analysis. Typical studies explain a relatively modest 10-to-20% of the variance in salesperson performance (Churchill, Ford, Hartley, & Walker, 1985; Rich, Bommer, MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Johnson, 1999; Vinchur, Schippmann, Switzer, & Roth, 1998). Further, if one considers research examining behavioral determinants of salesperson job performance, the field has had an almost exclusive focus on the salesperson's "externally-directed" behavior — how the salesperson acts and what strategies and tactics he/she employs in dealing with customers and prospects. Even within this context, there is little-to-no consensus amongst scholars or supporting empirical work in the industrial marketing literature to definitively show that any one such externally-directed selling perspective is superior to another, or that different types of sales skills may actually be required for different types of selling contexts (Cron, Marshall, Singh, Spiro, & Sujan, 2005; Franke & Park, 2006; Vinchur et al., 1998). This work begins from the premise that the "internally-directed" dimension of the sales role – salesperson behaviors and job functioning inside one's own organization – has an important influence on salesperson performance. This is consistent with some early perspectives on the sales role (Walker, Churchill, & Ford, 1977; Weitz, 1981) as well as with practitioner and anecdotal accounts (Rasmusson, 1999; Stevens & Kinni, 2007). However, other than a few isolated conceptual pieces (e.g., Sujan, 1999; Weitz & Bradford, 1999), the sales literature has not explicitly paid much attention to the internally-directed dimension of the sales job or the drivers of such behavior (Williams & Plouffe, 2007). The broad phenomenon of interest in this research is labeled salesperson navigation (or SpN, Plouffe & Barclay, 2007). It describes the act of a salesperson purposefully exploring their own organization to interact with key others. These key others may have resources, decision-making authority, and/or the ability to shape policy in the salesperson's favor, all of which could be important influences on the salesperson's ultimate success in dealing with customers and prospects. The specific goal of this paper is to empirically demonstrate the significance of one form of navigational behavior – "exploratory navigation" (as articulated by Plouffe & Barclay, 2007, pp. 531–532) – on salesperson performance, as well as to explore selected individual-level antecedents to this behavior. In terms of antecedents, we focus Industrial Marketing Management 39 (2010) 538–550 ⁎ Corresponding author.

Volume

39

First Page

538

Last Page

550

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