Retaining Talented Salespeople

Abstract

For any marketing organization that relies on personal selling, it is vital to attract and retain successful salespeople who fit well with the organization. In this paper, we examine how salespeople learn about their fit with the organization and about their future performance and how they use this to make the decision to stay or leave. We depart from the extant sales management literature on retention/turnover in that we model individual sales employees' stay/leave decisions using a structural model that accommodates forward looking behaviour. In our application, the dynamic model explains turnover better than a model that does not consider forward looking behaviour. Our approach also immediately yields several insights about the roles of person-organization fit and sales performance satisfaction in sales force turnover. Overall, and accounting for personorganization fit, we find that good performance encourages Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (the salesperson to stay longer with the selling organization. Most importantly, the relative importance of personorganization fit and salesperson performance in determining turnover varies over time. In particular, person-organization fit plays a bigger role at the beginning of a salesperson's tenure, whereas satisfaction associated with selling performance plays a larger relative role at later stages.

Inside sales agent’s sales activities influence on work outcomes and sales agent tenure through autonomous motivation

“…leader-member exchange (Li et al , 2018), supervisor support (DeConinck, 2011a) and role empowerment (Erdogan and Bauer, 2009). Limited research on the direct relationship between sales performance and turnover or turnover intentions has confirmed its negative correlation (DeConinck and Johnson, 2009; Lu et al , 2015). According to Kemery et al (1989), turnover and tenure are considered different constructs.…”

The role of strategic leadership for learning on the relationship between training opportunities and salesperson job performance and commitment

“…In the USA alone, there are roughly 20 million salespeople, so their job performance is very important to their organizations (Fu, 2015). For organizations that depend on personal selling, cultivating and retaining high-performing salespeople who are committed to the organization is critical for success (Lu et al , 2015). Salespeople affect customer satisfaction and loyalty, and as a result, their performances can have short- and long-term benefits for an organization.…”

Sales-Orientation and Customer-Orientation on Performance of Direct Sales Executives of Fidelity Bank, Ghana

“…The result indicates gender diversity considering the closeness of the gender of the DSE's which is good for the Fidelity Bank. The result will benefit from Lu et al, (2015) assertion that the emphasis on person-organisation fit must be the priority of organisation's recruitment than focusing more on other demographic variables.…”

“…The view of Lu et al, (2015) suggesting that the emphasis on person-organisation fit must be the priority of organisation's recruitment than focusing more on gender, prior experience in sales of employment status. This is insightful as an extension to the discussion of this result.…”

“…The authors further indicated that personal selling should be oriented toward securing customer satisfaction, and not just purchase orders. Lu et al, (2015) suggested that they expect that any marketing organization that relies on personal selling must consider it imperative to attract and retain successful salespeople who will fit well with the organization. They further indicated that person-organisation fit plays a bigger role at the beginning of salespersons tenure, whereas satisfaction associated with selling performance plays a larger relative role at later stage.…”