Willem J. Verbeke, Frank D. Belschak, Arnold B. Bakker, & Bart Dietz
Executive Summary
As the economy becomes increasingly knowledge intensive, firms seek to source and assimilate new knowledge, which is transformed into business solutions for customers (“knowledge-based solutions”). Paul Romer, a prominent promoter of the knowledge economy, argues that knowledge is an endogenous factor of economic systems, and economic and business models should include knowledge as a key variable. Within the knowledge economy, salespeople sell knowledge-based solutions (e.g., pharmaceutical products, information technology applications, financial services). However, research on sales does not seem well prepared to deal with these new tasks and roles of salespeople. Traditional theories in sales primarily focus on salespeople’s social abilities; for example, customers are classified, and salespeople adapt their sales conversations to these different types of customers. Such a perspective treats knowledge as an exogenous factor, but knowledge should be treated as an endogenous factor in the development of knowledge-based solutions. Salespeople must act as knowledge brokers who need to transfer the knowledge related to their business solutions to customers. During the development of knowledge-based solutions, salespeople’s general mental ability (GMA) is constantly challenged and becomes a key factor in sales. However, researchers have found that GMA alone does not predict sales performance well.
The authors argue that GMA is a person’s cognitive “hardware” and needs to be combined with corresponding cognitive “software,” such as social competence. They test this proposition in two samples of salespeople. First, they find that salespeople with high GMA and social competence were the best performers. Salespeople with high GMA but low social competence attained the lowest sales performance. To transfer knowledge to customers successfully, salespeople need to create feelings of psychological comfort in customers to enable them to structure their ideas and make informed choices. Customers may feel threatened by highly intelligent but socially incompetent salespeople, who may be viewed as being “too smart” and not able to relate to and focus their cognitive abilities on customers’ needs. Second, the authors find that salespeople with high GMA who strongly use judgmental thinking styles (i.e., using GMA to compare the customer’s business issues with other, similar business cases) also perform better: Selling knowledge-based solutions seems to require a case-based sales approach. Implications of this research are that firms should select salespeople with high GMA because they are able to achieve higher sales performance. In addition, salespeople with high GMA should be trained in social competence and taught to use concrete business cases in conversations with customers. The combination of high GMA (“hardware”) and a strong use of specific abilities (social competence and judicial thinking style; “software”) seems to facilitate the successful creation and selling of knowledge-based business solutions.
Biography
Willem Verbeke is Distinguished Professor in Sales and Account Management in the Department of Marketing, School of Economics, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is star member of the Erasmus Research Institute of Management and introduced courses on knowledge-based marketing in the School of Economics. He is also the founder and scientific director of the Institute for Sales and Account Management (ISAM) and codirector of the consulting firm Professional Capital. His work has appeared in leading academic journals, such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Frank D. Belschak is Assistant Professor of Human Resources Management–Organizational Behavior in the Amsterdam Business School at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Cologne in Germany. His current research interest is in personal selling and sales management, emotions in organizations, and proactivity at work. He has published in journals, such as Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Arnold B. Bakker is Full Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and senior managing director of the Centre for Organisational Behaviour (C4OB). He received his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Groningen. His current research interest is in work engagement, emotions in organizations, and positive organizational behavior. He has published in journals, such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Management.
Bart Dietz is an assistant professor and a doctoral candidate in Human Resource Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He holds an MSc in Business Administration with a major in Marketing Management from the same university. His current research focuses on sales force management.
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 72, No. 4, July 2008
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