Understanding and motivating salesperson resilience
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Understanding and motivating salesperson resilience Valerie Good 1
& Douglas
E. Hughes 2 & Alexander C. LaBrecque 3
Accepted: 4 November 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Prior research has shown that approximately half of salespeople fail to achieve their targets each year. Not only is the role difficult but also sales jobs are often marked by high levels of stress, rejection, and burnout. Thus, salesperson resilience is critical. However, a gap remains in our understanding of how resilience influences performance and how managers can motivate salespeople to be more resilient. To answer these questions, we collected survey data from 110 salespeople from a large firm based in the Midwest, along with objective effort and performance data provided by the company prior to and following a poor performance review. Our analyses reveal that intrinsically motivated salespeople are more resilient than salespeople driven by a desire for financial compensation. In addition, resilience leads to sales performance through increasing two types of effort—both initiating more calls with customers and achieving longer average call duration. Hence, our findings demonstrate that resilient salespeople not only persevere but also become better at selling in the process. Keywords Resilience . Perseverance . Intrinsic motivation . Personal selling . Sales
* Valerie Good [email protected] Douglas E. Hughes [email protected] Alexander C. LaBrecque [email protected]
1
Department of Marketing, Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University, 50 Front Ave SW, Grand Rapids, MI 49504, USA
2
School of Marketing and Innovation, Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Ave., BSN3231FL 33620-5500 Tampa, USA
3
Department of Marketing, Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University, 632 Bogue St, East Lansing, MI 48825, USA
Marketing Letters
Past research has lamented that insufficient research examines how to motivate underperforming salespeople (Boichuk et al. 2019). While studies have investigated the effect of financial incentives to motivate sales force effectiveness (e.g., Bommaraju and Hohenberg 2018; Chung and Narayandas 2017), scant literature has examined how firms can motivate their sales force to not give up, but rather try harder, when salespeople experience failure. Given that past research has identified that nearly half of salespeople do not achieve their annual sales targets, this issue is important to both academics and sales managers (Lussier and Hartmann 2017). Scholars could argue that failure to reach goals may be by design.1 According to goal setting theory, difficult goals lead to greater performance than easy, vague, or no goals at all (Locke and Latham 2002). Likewise, studies have shown that when faced with easy goals, salespeople tend to be overly confident they can fulfill the goals without investing a lot of effort; whereas by contrast, when goals are perceived to be too difficult, salespeople tend to have a low
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