Onboarding Salespeople: Socialization Approaches

Abstract

The effective training of salespeople is crucial to a firm’s success; there is arguably no more critical type of training than a salesperson’s onboarding. In this study, the authors leverage a natural field experiment in which a firm’s newly hired salespeople can undergo onboarding through either a decentralized program or a centralized program to examine the relative impact of each program. Drawing on organizational socialization theory, the authors consider whether an onboarding program that incorporates both individualized and institutionalized socialization tactics (the decentralized program) can develop salespeople into higher performers by encouraging them to take a more innovative and adaptive approach to different facets of the sales role. The findings reveal that salespeople who underwent the decentralized program achieved approximately 23.5% higher sales performance than those who underwent the centralized program. The performance benefits of the decentralized program were amplified for salespeople whose managers had a narrower span of control. In addition, these performance benefits were appreciable for those salespeople transitioning from another job but negligible for those transitioning from school. A scenario-based experiment enriches the field experiment’s findings by showing evidence of the theorized mechanism underlying the sales performance benefits observed: the fostering of an innovative role orientation.

Sink or Swim: Developing an Alternative Measure of Employee Socialization

“…First, the OST scale was developed in 1986 and has remained mostly unchanged since then; therefore, the items may not reflect the tactics that organizations currently employ. For example, socialization has become significantly more decentralized given the advancement of digital technologies in employee training (Wiseman, et al, 2022 ). This has been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, as organizations have been forced to adapt to the increasing use of home offices.…”

The Future of Research on International Selling and Sales Management

“…Selling and sales management research often considers the interactions that occur between at least two of these stakeholders. For example, prior work examines how managers control salespeople (e.g., Schmitz et al 2020; Wiseman et al 2022), how salespeople interact with customers (e.g., Delpechitre, Beeler-Connelly, and Chaker 2018; Kassemeier et al 2022; Zablah et al 2012), how managers develop customer-related sales strategies (e.g., Homburg, Droll, and Totzek 2008), and how managers lead salespeople to effectively interact with customers (e.g., Ahearne et al 2010; Alavi et al 2018).…”

From Vision to Reality: Lessons in Creating a Marketplace of Ideas

“…Your head is already stuffed full of that material, and you’ll end up doing a small twiddle on someone else's model.” JM examples of such real-world-inspired topics include the use and misuse of genetic data in marketing (Daviet, Nave, and Wind 2022) and how GMO labeling policy affects consumer choice and willingness to pay (Kim, Kim, and Arora 2022). Other relevant topics point to underexplored theoretical domains such as company use of temporary marketing organizational structures (Ghazimatin, Mooi, and Heide 2021; Hadida, Heide, and Bell 2019) or the onboarding of salespeople through different socialization strategies (Wiseman et al 2022).…”