چگونه استراتژی های فروش را عملی کنیم: ارزش پایه ای فروش و نقش محوری فروشنده و مشتری How sales strategy translates into performance: The role of salesperson customer orientation and value-based selling

Business-to-business firms’ selling practices are becoming increasingly analytical and top-management focused (Homburg et al., 2000; Homburg et al., 2008a, 2008b; Leigh & Marshall, 2001; Storbacka et al., 2009). While the conceptualization of sales strategy (Panagopoulos & Avlonitis, 2010) has been an important step in studying these more strategic rather than operational aspects of selling, few empirical studies have shed light on the effect of sales strategy on performance. Most research on sales strategy remains conceptual or provides only anecdotal evidence (e.g., Ingram et al., 2002). How can firms increase the performance outcomes of their sales strategy? “By effective implementation” is the most straightforward answer. Marketing and organizational scholars have long identified strategy implementation as an important mechanism linking strategy to performance outcomes (Bonoma, 1984; Noble & Mokwa, 1999). They widely agree that effective implementation is pivotal for translating a strategy’s performance potential into actual firm performance, and some have even suggested that strategy implementation is more important for performance outcomes than the strategy itself. As Sterling (2003, p. 27) observes, “effective implementation of an average strategy, beats mediocre implementation of a great strategy every time.” Yet, current business marketing studies provide only little guidance for firms on how to implement their sales strategies effectively. This limitation is due to the fact that surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms that translate sales strategy into performance in business markets. The limited understanding stems from three important gaps in the literature. First, it was not until recently that a study conceptualized sales strategy and provided initial evidence for a significant impact of sales strategy on performance, but it raised the question of why the performance relationship was rather weak and underlined the need to study more closely “the chain of effects” of how sales strategy affects performance (Panagopoulos & Avlonitis, 2010, 54). Second, empirical research on sales strategy has focused thus far on organizational-level variables when studying the relationship between sales strategy and performance (Panagopoulos & Avlonitis, 2010). Although research has produced critical insights into firm-level issues affecting the effectiveness of sales strategy, the role of salespeople and their behaviors in the implementation of a firm’s sales strategy have remained almost unstudied. This is in contrast to prior research which suggests that salespeople are the key to strategy implementation and that salespeople’s customer orientation is particularly important to this end (Noble & Mokwa, 1999; Saxe & Weitz, 1982). Third, scholars have recently stressed the relevance of a specific salesperson behavior – value-based selling – in successfully transforming a firm’s value proposition into sales performance in business markets (Anderson et al., 2009; Terho et al., 2012; Töytäri et al., 2011). Yet no empirical research has investigated how value-based selling relates to salesperson performance or how the concept contributes to the sales strategy–performance link. In this study we address these important concerns by developing and testing a theoretical model of how sales strategy translates into performance in business markets. Our focus lies principally on salespeople and their role in implementing sales strategy. Specifically, the study (a) develops a model of how three conceptually distinct facets of sales strategy affect salespeople and their selling performance; (b) tests the hypothesized direct, mediated, and moderating effects of these facets on salesperson selling performance; and (c) further investigates the relationship between sales strategy and organizational market performance employing multilevel structural equation modeling, based on a large-scale data set of 816 salespeople and directors from 30 independent sales organizations. The study makes several important contributions to the existing literature. First, our research offers novel insights into the complex mechanisms that translate sales strategy into salesperson performance. It shows that each sales strategy dimension affects salesperson performance in a unique way and, in addition to a direct effect, the performance outcomes of the sales strategy depend on salespeople’s customer orientation and value-based selling behavior. Since sales strategy dimensions and sales force behaviors vary across firms, our results can explain the modest overall effect of sales strategy on performance found in prior research (Panagopoulos & Avlonitis, 2010). Second, sales strategy’s moderating effect on the relationship between salespeople’s customer orientation and performance as well as valuebased selling’s mediating role in the relationship between customer orientation and salesperson performance can help explain why prior meta-analytic research (Franke & Park, 2006) has not found a consistent effect of customer orientation on salesperson performance. Third, our study provides an operationalization of value-based selling and shows that it plays a key role in linking organizational- and individual-level determinants of performance on business markets. Finally, from a methodological perspective, our research demonstrates that multilevel analysis is well suited to strategy implementation research. Strategy implementation spans different hierarchical levels within an organization, such as sales directors and individual salespeople. Multilevel analysis can model causal processes that take place within and also between hierarchical levels, thereby enabling a deeper understanding of the practical challenges of strategy implementation.