Sales and Value Creation: A Synthesis and Directions for Future Research

How does the sales organization contribute to the creation of value to a firm and its customers? Understanding sales’ pivotal role in the creation of value has been a long-standing goal of researchers and managers alike (Lindgreen and Wynstra 2005). Taking up the issue in their review of relevant literature, Haas, Snehota, and Corsaro (2011) convincingly argue that prior research has dealt with sales’ value-creating role mostly per assumption and not systematically. Despite of scholars’ extensive focus on sales’ performance outcomes, the two most prominent salesperson behaviors under investigation in the sales literature (i.e., adaptive selling and customer-oriented selling) have been shown to account for only 9% or less of the variance in salesperson performance (Franke and Park 2006). And research that explicitly addresses the question of how the sales function adds value to the customer is still in its infancy. Accordingly, Singh and Koshy reflect (2010, p. 2): “we do not yet know if business-to-business salespersons actually create value in their relationship with customers”.