Drivers of sales performance: a contemporary meta-analysis. Have salespeople become knowledge brokers?

By Willem J. M. I. Verbeke, Bart Dietz, Ernst Verwaal. 2010

643 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been 25 years since the publication of a comprehensive review of the full spectrum of sales-performance drivers. This study takes stock of the contemporary field and synthesizes empirical evidence from the period 1982–2008. The authors revise the classification scheme for sales performance determinants devised by Walker et al. (1977) and estimate both the predictive validity of its sub-categories and the impact of a range of moderators on determinant-sales performance relationships. Based on multivariate causal model analysis, the results make two major observations: (1) Five sub-categories demonstrate significant relationships with sales performance: selling-related knowledge (β = .28), degree of adaptiveness (β = .27), role ambiguity (β = −.25), cognitive aptitude (β = .23) and work engagement (β = .23). (2) These sub-categories are moderated by measurement method, research context, and sales-type variables. The authors identify managerial implications of the results and offer suggestions for further research, including the conjecture that as the world is moving toward a knowledge-intensive economy, salespeople could be functioning as knowledge-brokers. The results seem to back this supposition and indicate how it might inspire future research in the field of personal selling.

Subfields: Accounting, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec6830b8c7fd678ab027556702c914d4b3e03a09

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Citations in the corpus

The good, the bad and the effective: a meta-analytic examination of selling orientation and customer orientation on sales performance (2014, methodology): “…raw correlations (r) for reliability and then weighted them for sample size to minimize potential differences with the ‘true’ correlation that is free of artefacts, as suggested by literature and recent meta-analyses (Hunter and Schmidt 2004; Verbeke, Dietz, and Verwaal 2011; Zablah et al. 2012).”
Sales profession and professionals in the age of digitization and artificial intelligence technologies: concepts, priorities, and questions (2019, background): “…by digital technologies, particularly AI technologies, on both the sales profession , in the spirit of the “ macro ” approach espoused by past researchers (Cron 2017), and the sales professional , in the spirit of the individual approach common in past research (Verbeke, Dietz and Verwaal 2011).”