New customers are critical to the success of the B2B sales process yet acquiring them is an ongoing challenge. Building rapport is necessary for expanding strong, long-term business relationships; engaging customers in designing custom solutions; and gaining customer loyalty.

A former sales director of mine always reminded his sale management team that “Feedback is a Gift”. As a rookie sales manager at the time, I didn’t at first connect with this metaphor. But as time went on, I realized that the more feedback members of my sales team received from me, the more productive these conversations became. Feedback became the launching pad for more systematic sales coaching which served the purpose of providing ongoing reinforcement of positive selling behaviors and suggestions for corrective action when performance improvement was warranted. After all, we were all working toward the same goal – to maximize our selling performance.

Dan Butterfield
Class of 2011
Director of Solution Consulting, Rocket Mortgage/Quicken Loans

The purpose of this study was to provide insight on how salespeople use techniques of neutralization to justify unethical sales behavioral intentions. Neutralization techniques are rooted in behavioral psychology and describe the attributions people make to help them mentally justify their actions.

Sarah Cullen
Expected Graduation May 2022

Imagine your sales force doesn’t support your branding strategy? Can you build an effective marketing program? Imagine selling a product/service that you don’t believe in, for a company whose brand you don’t align with. Is it possible to hit your sales targets and succeed in this kind of environment? Questions like these have plagued the sales and marketing departments at many organizations over the years. But does the alignment of the salespeople with the brand really matter?

Partner Since 2009

Do your salespeople really know what their customers expect?

Kelsea Kiene
Class of 2014
Northeast Sales Manager, Industrial and Safety Markets Center, 3M

Failure from time to time is inevitable for all salespeople. Therefore, it is important for sales managers to understand how salespeople deal with failure so they may best support and promote future efforts. This study utilized a sample of 112 salesperson respondents. The results of the study offer insight on how the Conservation of Resource View Theory (COR) can be applied to salesperson failure attributions and thus offer practical guidelines for sales managers.

 Partner Since 2017

Feedback is a gift! The coaching feedback provided to your salespeople inevitably will result in the greatest gift of all - improved performance. Effective sales coaching is an action-oriented process to help salespeople further develop their knowledge, skills, and efforts. It is not a one-time event – rather a sequence of ongoing conversations providing lessons to maximize performance. In fact, a study by the HR Chally Group found that salespeople who received weekly of one-on-one coaching with their managers were twice as productive as other salespeople. Sounds great right? Unfortunately, and too often, coaching efforts fail. One reason is due to human nature - salespeople typically react negatively to coaching.

James Ireland
Expected Graduation December 2020

Mobile social networking and salesperson maladaptive dependence behaviors

Effects of sales control systems on how commission impacts salesperson intrinsic motivation in a customer oriented environment 

Alec Cusick
Class of 2017
Sales Development Program, Owens Corning

A long-standing phenomenon in the professional sales world is the discrepancy between knowledge of correct sales technique and implementation of technique in actual sales meetings. In other words, salespeople often know what they need to do but fail to do it with customers. We conducted research to look at how well salespeople were doing at using best practice selling techniques on the job, and the results might surprise you. Or maybe not…

Alex Edinger
Expected Graduation May 2019

Researchers have consistently found that motivation is a key determinant in salesperson performance. However, literature also suggests that salespeople are not all motivated by the same things. Therefore, the ways in which a sales manager can most effectively motivate their sales team, and thus extract the best sales performance from them, can become complex.

Karla Rhoads
Class of 2009
National Program Manager, Consumer Business, Goodyear Tire & Rubber