Exploratory navigation and salesperson performance: Investigating selected antecedents and boundary conditions in high-technology and financial services contexts

Christopher R. Plouffe, Srinivas Sridharan, Donald W. Barclay
2010 Industrial Marketing Management  
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
more » ... ing 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. Comer, 1984) . A secondary objective is to simultaneously explore whether specific characteristics of the sales context might act as boundary conditions on navigation. From a managerial standpoint, the expected utility of this research is two-fold: (i) helping sales managers better understand an overlooked salesperson competency (i.e., internal behaviors) which might, for example, enable better hiring decisions, while also (ii) helping industrial salespeople themselves better understand the types of behaviors which might underlie exemplary sales performance. The balance of the paper is organized as follows. First, since the notion of salesperson navigation is relatively new, a review of relevant literature is undertaken to place the concept within the broader context of work on salesperson traits and performance. Next, the research model and hypotheses driving the study are explicated. The model is then tested using both primary and archival data collected from two Fortune 500 sales organizations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings, their implications for sales management research and marketing practice, and directions for future work in this area.
doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2009.02.003 fatcat:mc4v63qkojavlgtvhzjvaj7k5e