Impact of sales control systems
Impact of sales control systems
A B S T R A C T
By distinguishing customer-oriented behaviors into functional and relational ones, this study reveals how different combinations of sales control systems (namely activity control, outcome control, and capability control) affect a salesperson’s distinct customer-oriented behaviors, which subsequently influence sales performance.
By collecting data from business-to-business salespeople and their managers and using hierarchical linear modeling, we find that the outcome-capability control combination increases functional and relational customer-oriented behaviors.
The outcome-activity control combination decreases functional customer-oriented behaviors.
The activity-capability control combination increases functional customer-oriented behaviors but reduces relational customer-oriented behaviors.
In addition, we find that both customer-oriented behaviors not only boost sales performance individually, but also complement each other to positively affect sales performance.
These findings provide important theoretical and practical implications by demonstrating that combinations of control systems have a significant impact on a salesperson’s functional and relational customer-oriented behaviors.
Discussion and implications
This study investigates how various combinations of different control systems affect a salesperson’s customer-oriented behaviors and sales performance.
Our findings from the empirical evidence indicate that different combinations of control systems differently affect customer oriented behaviors.
Specifically, our results show that the outcome capability control combination increases both functional and relational customer-oriented
behaviors; the outcome-activity control combination decreases functional customer-oriented behaviors but does not affect relational customer-
oriented behaviors; and the activity-capability control combination benefits functional customer-oriented behaviors but hurts relational customer-oriented behaviors.