Toward a comprehensive framework of sales management within business-to-business marketing organisations

There has been much research regarding factors affecting salesperson performance, including the role of sales management. However, results have been inconsistent. There also has been some support for further studies of the effects of sales management behaviour on salesperson performance. Development of a comprehensive framework of the sales management process seemed necessary to facilitate such studies. This paper describes one step toward that development, which was facilitated by structured interviews with a sample of sales managers and salespeople from business-to-business sales organisations.

The new framework comprises components of sales management behaviour, and identifies the interactions of those components with salesperson attributes and performance, moderated by organisational and external factors beyond the control of the salesperson or sales manager. It is suggested that further work should be undertaken to validate or further extend the new framework, and then to apply the framework to develop new constructs and scales to enable a rigorous analysis of the effects of sales management behaviour on salesperson performance.