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CHAPTER 1
SELLING TO ALL INVOLVED: A CONTINGENT MODEL LINKING INTERNAL SELLING BEHAVIOR TO SALESPERSON ROLE STRESS AND SALES PERFORMANCE
Yongmei Liu
ABSTRACT
Integrating relationship marketing and management research, the author explores internal selling (i.e., a salesperson’s internally focused efforts intended to identify, solicit, and use internal sales resources to support external selling activities) as a unique source of salespeople role stress and examine its contingent outcomes. The conceptual model suggests that internal selling as a job demand and stressor leads to increased salespeople role stress. However, a number of situational (i.e., selling organization market orientation, service climate, and seller–buyer relationship) and individual factors (i.e., networking ability and psychological capital of the salespeople) serve as job and personal resources to moderate the internal selling–outcome relationships, such that when such resources are adequate, internal selling will reduce role stress and increase sales performance. The author also examines situational (i.e., customer solutions offering and formalization of the selling organization) and individual (i.e., salespeople power and social status) antecedents of internal selling. The model provides useful insights and practical guidance for selling organizations to recognize mechanisms associated with internal selling in their organizations, and to intentionally design within organization support systems to enhance salespeople well being and enable them to participate effectively in the relational process of selling. The chapter stresses the need to develop context-specific stress models for different occupations and job roles.
Keywords: Internal selling of salespeople; role stress; sales performance; job demands-resources theory; stressor; business-to-business salespeople
The work of industrial salespeople is inherently stressful (Chaker, Schumann, Zablah, & Flint, 2016; Jones, Brown, Zoltners, & Weitz, 2005), and salespeople burnout and turnover continue to be a concern for industrial marketing organizations (Katsikea, Theodosiou, & Morgan, 2015; Lewin & Sager, 2009). Not only sales jobs involve high competition and constant performance pressure, the boundary-spanning roles of salespeople make it uniquely challenging (Jones et al., 2005; Sager & Wilson, 1995). With customers’ expectations shifting from buying products and service to buying business solutions, many salespeople today not only have to identify prospective customers, develop and maintain customer relations, and satisfy customer needs (i.e., the external side of selling), but also have to coordinate internal resources to support their selling efforts (i.e., the internal side of selling).
Today, salespeople frequently find themselves involved in procuring and coordinating resources from various functions within the selling organization (e.g., finance, marketing, engineering, and R&D) to meet the increasingly complex customer demands (Stevens & Kinni, 2007; Üstüner & Godes, 2006). They also have to balance the tension between fulfilling customer needs and ensuring profitability of a business deal to the selling organization (Nonis & Sager, 2003; Sager & Wilson, 1995), all the while being expected to create value for both firms (Sleep, Bharadwaj, & Lam, 2015; Stevens & Kinni, 2007; Weitz & Bradford, 1999). These aspects of the sales job represent significant demands on salespeople.
Prior research has devoted remarkable effort into understanding salespeople stress, focusing primarily on how role stressors (i.e., role overload, role ambiguity, and role conflict) contribute to salesperson outcomes (e.g., Babakus, Cravens, Johnston, & Moncrief, 1999; Johnson & Sohi, 2014; Lewin & Sager, 2009; Low, Cravens, Grant, & Moncrief, 2001; Singh, 1998). This research has also identified factors associated with role stressors, such as organizational values (e.g., Flaherty, Dahlstrom, & Skinner, 1999) and leadership (e.g., Schwepker & Good, 2017; Schwepker & Ingram, 2016). Lately, more attention has been paid to factors associated with specific factors associated with the sales job that contribute to salespeople stress, such as ethical climate (e.g., Jaramillo, Mulki, & Solomon, 2006), polychronicity (i.e., preference for switching tasks – Fournier, Weeks, Blocker, & Chonko, 2013), and psychological insecurity (e.g., Chaker et al., 2016).
Indeed, sales jobs have many unique aspects that make unique demands on the salespeople, to which they respond with their unique set of job and personal resources. Thus, it is necessary to investigate job-specific stressors of salespeople and ways they cope with these stressors. In this chapter, I focus on an important job role and a potential stressor of salespeople, internal selling. Internal selling refers to a salesperson’s internally focused efforts intended to identify, solicit, and use internal sales resources to support external selling activities (Liu, Bradford, & Weitz, 2018). Based on the transactional stress theory (Lazarus, 1966, 1991; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), job demands-resources (JD-R) theory (e.g., Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), and the political view of organizations, I examine the contingent relationships between internal selling and salespeople outcomes (i.e., role stress and sales performance). I further examine situational (i.e., customer solutions offering and formalization of the selling organization) and individual (i.e., power and social status of salespeople) factors that lead to internal selling.
This chapter makes important contributions to the stress and personal selling literature. First, I focus on a job-specific stressor of salespeople (i.e., internal selling) and examine its potential influence on salespeople role stress based on the JD-R theory. While a broad examination of salespeople stress and performance based solely on role theory helps understand salespeople stress, it does not offer insights into job and organizational design issues specific to the sales context. By focusing on internal selling and the related stress process, I identify conditions under which this specific job role causes role stress. Discussions on the boundary conditions of internal selling offer useful practical guidance to sales management.
Second, this chapter contributes to the emerging literature on intra-organizational processes of selling. Recent research has revealed that salespeople who are effective in coordinating intra-organizational resources to assist their selling efforts outperform others (e.g., Bolander, Satornino, Hughes, & Ferris, 2015; Steward, Walker, Hutt, & Kumar, 2010). However, the potential impact of this internally oriented job role on work stress has yet to be understood. To understand that internal selling represents a potential job stressor that has performance implications will help selling organizations better support the salesforce by equipping them with competencies development and by fostering organizational and inter-organizational conditions facilitative of intra-organization resources coordination.
Finally, I also examine organizational and individual characteristics that give rise to salespeople’ need and motivation to engage in internal selling. To date, discussions on antecedents of internal selling have been limited (see Plouffe, Sridharan, & Barclay, 2010 for an exception). Salespeople’s active engagement in internal selling can both be a reflection of proactivity of salespeople, and a reflection of organizational conditions, either healthy or unhealthy, that promote this kind of interpersonal influence behaviors (Bradford, Liu, Shi, Weitz, & Xu, in press). Understanding factors that increase the tendency of salespeople to engage in internal selling will help selling organizations better understand organizational conditions needed to facilitate value-generating internal selling and monitor whether internal selling is facilitative of a healthy work environment for all involved.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The Sales Job in the Contemporary Business World
The job role of salespeople in the contemporary business world is becoming increasingly relational (Bolander et al., 2015; Steward et al., 2010; Weitz & Bradford, 1999). While transactional, product-focused buyer–seller relationships require salespeople to primarily focus on broadening customer bases and closing deals, today’s relational buyer–seller relationships has shifted salespeople’s effort toward building and maintaining long-term customer relationships that generate values for both parties (Jones et al., 2005). This transformation of the business-to-business (B2B) relationship has dramatically changed the job role and daily activities of many B2B salespeople.
Today, business customers expect salespeople not only to serve as key point of contact, but also to act as “surrogate managers” on their behalf, essentially managing the part of the business the customers chose to outsource (Stevens & Kinni, 2007, p. 8). As surrogate managers they are expected to provide solutions for the customers’ specific needs and generating results at the same time. Today, developing and delivering customized solutions tailored to specific customer needs has become the primary path to a selling organization’s competitive advantage (Tuli, Kohli, & Bharadwaj, 2007; Ulaga & Reinartz, 2011). Salespeople, as the linking pin for such solutions, have thereby become the foundation of this competitive advantage (Stevens & Kinni, 2007).
To meet buyers’ expectations for customized solutions and results, salespeople have to effectively identify, procure, and mobilize the intra-organizational resources so as to develop and deliver solutions to customer problems (Stevens & Kinni, 2007). The increasing complexity of customer needs means that an individual salesperson can rarely handle them alone. Rather, salespeople frequently have to assemble a post hoc, cross-functional support team to meet specific customer needs (Steward et al., 2010; Üstüner & Godes, 2006). For example, a salesperson of enterprise technology may frequently need to use expertise of the organization’s software engineers to add client-specific features, and depend on them to give such tasks proper priorities. A salesperson of airplanes may have to work with the coworkers in finance and logistics to figure out likely complicated financing and delivery options.
Although most selling organizations have some formal sales support systems granting salespeople certain level of authority or leverage when working with the service and support personnel, it can quickly become unclear who are to support which salespeople, when, for what specific needs, and with what level of urgency. In these situations, instead of relying on formal authority and following standard procedures to get things accomplished, salespeople have to depend on personal work relationships with potential team members to access the expertise and specific solution knowledge these members may offer. Thus, salespeople are not only relationship managers (Weitz & Bradford, 1999) in the sense that they have to develop, maintain, and grow customer relationships, but they also have to be relationship managers within their own organization, and “sell” their selling needs and build their expert consultancy internally (Steward et al., 2010).
Indeed, researchers have used terms, such as “orchestrators of organizational resources” (Jones et al., 2005, p. 107) and boundary spanners (e.g., Sleep et al., 2015), to describe the job role of salespeople. That is, to generate value for the customer, effective salespeople have to interrelate with multiple stakeholders and to pull resources from a diverse set of groups and individuals (Steward et al., 2010; Sleep et al., 2015). Thus, to serve customers well, salespeople have to develop diverse intra-organizational networks, to ensure access to the needed information and resources, to get them to the right people, and to coordinate efforts of groups and individuals with diverse interests (Stevens & Kinni, 2007; Steward et al., 2010; Üstüner & Godes, 2006). These internally oriented activities are what is referred to as internal selling.
Internal Selling as a Job Demand
Providing customized solutions represents significant opportunities for organizations and salespeople (Stevens & Kinni, 2007). Selling organizations who are able to provide integrated customer solutions gain significant competitive advantage via their access to intimate customer information and goodwill ...
