Review Note

8/3/2019 Review Note

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Role identity and attributions of high-performing salespeople

In the USA companies spend a big amount of more than $7 billion per year to train the

salespeople for better working. And with the passage of time the need of more capablesalespeople increases the companies also increase the functional areas from where they could

find variety of workers for enhancing companies working.

Sales research article identifies two broad theories: a) a sale consultant identity that represent

a company's products or services in order to obtain new customers. The term sales consultant

is broad because the exact duties and scope of responsibilities depend on the type of business.

For example, some sales consultants help other businesses improve their sales force. Other

sales consultants inform and advise customers or clients about products or services with the

primary goal of generating sales. b) a technical specialist identity mainly focused on vertical

integration, physical facilities, even a seemingly superior product can no longer assure a

competitive edge. Instead, sustainable advantage is more and more likely to come from

developing superior capabilities in a few core service skills--and out-sourcing as much of the

rest as possible. In short we define a sales consultant as a salesperson who views their role as a

relationship manager aiming to help customers with challenges across all dimensions of their

business, with the goal of providing solutions and creating collaborative relationships. We

define a technical specialist as a salesperson who relies on their particular product/service

knowledge to solve customer problems. Sales consultants view themselves as consultative

problem-solvers, whereas the technical specialists focus on using their own technical

specialization to fit customer needs. In relying on their own technical skills, technical specialists

may be more inclined to overlook the talent of other organizational members dispersed across

the selling organization. In contrast, sales consultants see their role as solving customer

problems regardless of where the needed expertise might be found. Further, the relational

focus of sales consultants enables discovery of unmet customer needs and opportunities;

whereas, the technical specialists focus on current technical problems may limit the

identification of ways in which to help customers in the long run.

In situations where the outcome was immediately known based on whether or not a sale was

made. In the sales literature on attributions, research has predominantly focused on generalcausal beliefs a salesperson makes and the subsequent intentions for future actions such as to

work harder, to seek assistance, or to change strategies.

A sample of 60 business-to-business salespeople and their respective sales managers at Fortune

100 high-technology company. The salespeople in our sample classified their role perception in

the company, and described attributions for both a recent successful and unsuccessful


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customer engagement. Additionally, sales managers provided overall performance ratings for

each salesperson. Collecting data from multiple sources allowed them to examine the

relationships among role identities, attributions, and performance.

In this research paper three contributions to the identity and attribution of sales people have

been made. First, to demonstrate that business-to-business salespeople who possess different

role identities perform differently. Few studies have examined the impact of identity upon

performance. While previous research on attributions has focused solely on global attributions

(locus of causality, causal stability, and controllability) examine finer-grained attributions that

relate to relationships surrounding the selling process and the attributions corresponding to the

technical performance of the product/service provided. By isolating these two attribution

categories, relational factors and technical factors provide specific theoretical and practical

implications for sales management.

An array of research has examined the way in which self-enhancing attributions vary withindividual factors such as optimism and self-efficacy. The dominant theme from this research is

that attributions depend on the way in which we view ourselves. Based on this literature, we

propose that there are differences in both role identity and attributions between higher- versus

lower-performing salespeople.

Hypothesis:

Role identity is the way in which we define and view ourselves in a given role. In the sales

context for high-technology products and services, we suggest that two natural identities

emerge:

1) An identity as a sales consultant

2) An identity as a technical specialist

Exploratory study was conducted at a Fortune 100 high technology company. The sample

consisted of 60 business-to-business salespeople each responsible for identifying, securing, and

managing resources, including the personnel and knowledge needed for each engagement.

A one-hour telephone interview was conducted with each salesperson. Open-ended questions

were asked about the details of how each engagement unfolded.

For each engagement the salesperson was asked about attributes, role identity and

performance.


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H1 was examined by conducting planned contrasts comparing the performance between

salespeople who saw themselves as sales consultants to those salespeople who saw themselves

as technical specialists.

H2 and H3 examined the relationships among role identity and attributions for engagement

success and failure. The descriptive results illustrate a clear difference between the attribution

patterns in successful versus unsuccessful engagements.

The descriptive results illustrate a clear difference between the attribution patterns in

successful versus unsuccessful engagements. In successful engagements, 48.3 percent (n 29)

of salespeople overall attributed success to the performance of the team; whereas only 6.7

percent (n 4) of salespeople attributed unsuccessful engagements to the team. Further,

whereas 65 percent (n 39) of salespeople attributed unsuccessful engagements to either

another department within the selling firm or to the customers organization, only 1.7 percent

(n 1) of salespeople overall attributed success to either another department within the sellingfirm or the customers company.

Analysis shows that salespeople who attributed success to relational factors performed better

than those attributing success to technical factors. Not surprisingly, the type of salesperson

attribution was also linked to salesperson performance. Specifically, not only did salespeople

who thought of themselves as sales consultants, rather than technical specialists, tend to

attribute success to relational factors, but those salespeople who attributed success to

relational factors had higher performance than those who attributed success in a customer

engagement to technical factors.

One of the more striking differences across engagements, regardless of role identity, is

salespeoples attribution of failure to another division or department within the organization,

with 35 percent of salespeople attributing failure to another division or department within their

organization. Further, 30 percent of salespeople blamed the customers company for failure.

These results contrast to successful engagements in which no salesperson attributed success to

another division of the selling company or to the customer organization itself. By attributing

success to internal factors shaped by the salesperson and failure to external factors, the results

are consistent with attribution theory. Performance differences across roles and attribution

categories and engagements.

To cut-short this richest research has shown that most of the behaviors of salespeople mostly

depend upon how they themselves identify their roles. Moreover their attributes defines that

how they will be performing in future

The positive relationship found between relational attributions and performance suggests sales

training programs may benefit by diagnosing the attributions for successful and unsuccessful


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