Salesperson Selection, Training, and Development: Trends, Implications, and Research Opportunities

By William L. Cron, Greg W. Marshall, Jagdip Singh, Rosann L. Spiro, H. Sujan. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2005

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Building on the forces of change in selling identified in the introductory paper of this Special Issue of JPSSM, we identify and explicate trends, managerial implications, and research opportunities in two important domains of the selling field: training and development (TD) and selection. Part One focuses on TD of salespeople, and argues why a fresh perspective on salesperson TD is essential. Then, taking a knowledge, skills, and ability (KSA) approach, a framework for future TD content is proposed around three levels of KSAs: task-related KSAs, growth-related KSAs, and meta-KSAs. Part Two, on selection, focuses on several important predictors of salesperson success: cognitive ability tests, personality inventories, and biodata. Then, assessment methods are reviewed. Finally, we summarize with a discussion of emerging trends and research opportunities. The focus of the discussion is on both enhancing salesperson performance and affording scholars new research opportunities.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d34d64cfa6e4082181cccb6c5f7609b22c794da

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

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Citations in the corpus

Sales Force Effectiveness: A Framework for Researchers and Practitioners (2008, background): “2005); or on a subset of closely related drivers such as salesperson selection, training and development (Cron et al. 2005), or motivation, control,”
Salesperson ambidexterity and customer satisfaction: examining the role of customer demandingness, adaptive selling, and role conflict (2017, background): “One contribution of this manuscript is to empirically test this assertion, made formally by Cron et al. (2005): ‘in all likelihood, ambidexterity enhances adaptability and, more broadly, practical intelligence’ (128).”
When Intelligence is (Dys)Functional for Achieving Sales Performance (2008, background): “However, in addition, they need software, such as specific skills that allow them to apply their GMA in effective ways and to achieve high contextual intelligence (Cron et al. 2005; Sujan, Weitz, and Kumar 1994).”