Shahriar Gias

Graduation Semester and Year

2016

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing

Department

Marketing

First Advisor

B. Lawrence Chonko

Abstract

Sales force agility has been identified as an important issue for contemporary professional selling and sales management (Jones et al. 2005). However, up until now, marketing scholars have sparingly paid attention to the concept of sales agility. Marketers as well as salespeople are not quite informed about the term “salesperson agility” even though they sense the need for agility in order to deal with the changing business environment and customer requirements. Therefore, this dissertation explores sales agility in detail. First, in this dissertation, an extensive literature review is conducted to conceptually ascertain how agility might be different than adaptive selling, flexibility, diligence - metrics that contain some measure of adaptive behavior. Once this conceptual distinction is made, this research seeks to begin the journey toward the development of a salesperson agility scale based on the agility foundation of Kidd (1999) and Chonko and Jones (2005) agility selling. In examining the wisdom of developing an agility metric, this dissertation presented preliminary empirical examination of the construct and its relationship to other “adaptation” metrics including the adaptive selling approach. The work presented provide a starting point into the investigation of salesperson agility as a variable worthy of study in salesforce research. The question was posed as to whether or not salesperson agility provides any marginal contribution to knowledge of sales outcomes beyond that provided by adaptability. The answer based on the preliminary research presented is “yes”. Finally, a preliminary test of a proposed model in which the salesperson’s intrinsic motivation, customer orientation, and learning orientation are viewed as antecedents to salesperson agility which in turn impacts salesperson’s outcome performance, job satisfaction, and customer’s satisfaction with the salesperson has been conducted.

Keywords

Agility, Salesforce, Adaptive selling

Disciplines

Business | Marketing

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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