Building effective inside-outside sales rep dyads: A collaboration perspective

Business-to-business (B2B) firms regularly engage in collaborative selling where an outside sales (OS) representative (rep) interfaces with customers and an inside sales (IS) rep supports the OS reps through remote selling. While anecdotal evidence abounds, there is little empirical research examining factors driving successful IS-OS co-selling, as evidenced by objective sales performance. The authors use an organizational behavior lens and theories of shared team experiences and member knowledge diversity to posit that the collaboration experience (length and intensity) and product knowledge diversity affect customer sales outcomes. Further, they unpack how the efficacy of dyadic attributes should be contingent on the length of the customer–firm relationship and the customer’s product need complexity. Using field data and identification strategies suitable to their setting, the authors confirm that an IS–OS dyad’s collaboration experience and product knowledge diversity have a positive effect on customer-level sales outcome. However, they find a nuanced interplay of IS-OS dyadic attributes with customer characteristics. For example, customers with more complex product needs buy more when dyadic collaboration is long or intensive but not when the dyad possesses diverse product knowledge. The conceptual framework and empirical results together enable sales managers to match IS-OS dyads to customers they can serve profitably.