موقعیت خوب نیروی فروش: چگونه ادغام نیروی فروش منجر به موفقیت محصول جدید است The catbird seat of the sales force: How sales force integration leads to new product success

1. Introduction Previous studies acknowledge the effectiveness of market information processing activities in contributing to higher new product success rates (Ozkaya et al. 2015; Li and Calantone 1998). This line of research recognizes the integration of market insights from external stakeholders (e.g., customers, suppliers) and internal stakeholders (e.g., marketing, research and development) as a key success factor in new product development (NPD) (Gruner and Homburg 2000; Olson et al. 2001). The sales force has been proposed as an internal stakeholder group contributing to market intelligence but previous research has largely neglected the sales force in this role (Ahearne, Rapp, Hughes, and Jindal 2010a; Ernst, Hoyer, and Rübsaamen 2010). This lack of attention is surprising especially since the sales force can provide specific insights with respect to customer needs and competitive activities (Ernst et al. 2010; Le Bon and Merunka 2006). These insights are attributable to the frontline operations of salespeople and their direct interactions with market participants, which allow them to absorb unique market information that extends beyond the knowledge of other internal functions (Liao and Chuang 2004). The sales department thus harbors boundary people (Thietart and Vivas 1981) in an advantaged position to obtain valuable market intelligence. As such, the sales force is in a catbird seat for gathering external information, which can be leveraged internally to create new products that are better aligned with customer needs and that provide product advantages in the eyes of customers, enhance customers’ new product adoption and, ultimately, new product success. Incorporating these market insights into NPD may also promote the sales force’s own new product adoption behavior and motivate its role as vendors of new products that reflect their own input. Sales force new product adoption has been identified as a motivational factor and is defined as the salespeople’s acceptance of a new product and the internalization of its goals (i.e., commitment), as well as the extent to which they work hard and smartly to achieve these goals to make the new product successful (i.e., effort) (Hultink and Atuahene-Gima 2000). In fact, the sales force has been viewed as an internal customer whose adoption can critically impact new product success (Wieseke, Homburg, and Lee 2008). We argue that including the sales force‟s market intelligence in NPD may thus positively impact new product success via its own adoption behavior and should complement the effect on new product success via the external constituent ‘customer’. Hence, the intensity with which the market insights generated by the sales force are accounted for internally in the scope of NPD processes, which we define as sales force integration, may have favorable effects on the success of new products via these two separate routes. The objective of the present study is to scrutinize how sales force integration engenders new product success, i.e., the degree to which the new product achieves the corporate objectives which are associated with the new product project (Gatignon and Xuereb 1997) via these two routes.