IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03136152.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Increasing resilience by creating an adaptive salesforce

Author

Listed:
  • Arun Sharma
  • Deva Rangarajan
  • Bert Paesbrugghe

    (LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

During disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the resilience of any commercial organization becomes a critical characteristic. This paper examines the flexibility of the sales process—that is, adaptive selling—as an analog to resiliency, and recommends that firms create an adaptive salesforce to increase resilience. By examining the extant research and conducting interviews with sales leaders, the findings of this paper suggest that an adaptive salesforce should focus on three areas of change within team structures. The first is an increase in flexibility and adaptiveness for the functions that the salesforce performs. The second area is an improvement of the adaptiveness of scale in which sales functions can be rapidly insourced or outsourced. The final area is technology adaptiveness, in which the salesforce adopts the use of technologies that are most relevant to customers. Implications for the firm, sales function, and individual salespeople are also derived.

Suggested Citation

  • Arun Sharma & Deva Rangarajan & Bert Paesbrugghe, 2020. "Increasing resilience by creating an adaptive salesforce," Post-Print hal-03136152, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03136152
    DOI: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.05.023
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wenchuan Huang & Shouming Chen & Luu Thi Nguyen, 2020. "Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Resilience to COVID-19 Crisis: An Empirical Study of Chinese Firms," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(21), pages 1-19, October.
    2. Marc Lim, Weng, 2023. "Transformative marketing in the new normal: A novel practice-scholarly integrative review of business-to-business marketing mix challenges, opportunities, and solutions," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    3. Anand, Amitabh & Singh, Sanjay Kumar & Bowen, Melanie & Rangarajan, Deva, 2024. "Strategic renewal during crises - A pragmatist proposition for multinational enterprises in a globalized world," Journal of International Management, Elsevier, vol. 30(3).
    4. Yuan, Ruizhi & Luo, Jun & Liu, Martin J. & Yu, Jiang, 2022. "Understanding organizational resilience in a platform-based sharing business: The role of absorptive capacity," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 85-99.
    5. Oh, Joon-Hee & Johnston, Wesley J., 2023. "New evaluation metric for measuring sales training effectiveness," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    6. Rangarajan, Deva & Sharma, Arun & Lyngdoh, Teidorlang & Paesbrugghe, Bert, 2021. "Business-to-business selling in the post-COVID-19 era: Developing an adaptive sales force," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 64(5), pages 647-658.
    7. Ramos, Carla & Claro, Danny P. & Germiniano, Renato, 2023. "The effect of inside sales and hybrid sales structures on customer value creation," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    8. Soo Yeong Ewe & Helen Hui Ping Ho, 2024. "Psychological capabilities for salespeople’s sustainable work performance in financial services sector," Journal of Financial Services Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 29(2), pages 625-635, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03136152. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.