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Abstract
My dissertation focuses on critical facets of sales management and organizational performance, consisting of two interconnected essays. In Essay 1, I investigate the effectiveness of performance rankings as a motivational tool within sales organizations. I explore the impact of displaying various types of information alongside rankings—limited information (rankings and sales performance), expanded information (rankings, performance, and salespeople’s names), and full information (rankings, performance, names, and sales quotas). Through a cross-industry observational study of over 27,000 salespeople, my findings reveal that the expanded information has the greatest impact on improving salesperson performance. Interestingly, the full information condition did not result in a performance improvement compared to a control condition with no ranking information. These findings highlight the critical importance of selecting the most relevant performance information to pair with rankings in order to maximize their effectiveness in motivating salespeople. In Essay 2, I investigate the implications of the growing prevalence of inside sales roles across various industries. Using a unique dataset comprising 194 firms’ sales structures, merged with several secondary data sets, I explore how a firm’s proportion of inside salespeople affects revenue. This study reveals that while inside sales structures can be beneficial for some firms, it is not a universally appropriate design for all organizations. I find this relationship is highly contingent on various factors, specifically the complexity of a firm’s products, the competitive intensity of a firm’s industry, a firm’s experience within its industry, the span of control in a firm’s sales organization, the geographic dispersion of a firm’s sales force, and the proportion of farmers in a firm’s sales force.