Michael Rodriguez, assistant professor of marketing, and Haya Ajjan, assistant professor of management information systems, recently presented at the National Conference in Sales Management.
The conference, held April 3-6 in San Diego, Calif., focused on disseminating knowledge in the areas of sales management and personal selling.
Rodriguez and Ajjan presented their paper, “Impact of Sales Process Capability on CRM/Social Media Technology and Sales Performance.”
Below is an abstract:
Utilizing a resource-based view of the firm as a foundation, this paper presents and empirically tests a conceptual framework proposing that sales personnel capability and upper management support positively impacts social media and CRM utilization. The study also looks at sales business processes capability as a mediator between technology utilization and sales performance. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, using data from 1,433 sales professionals, indicates that (1) upper management and sales personnel capabilities have positive effects on the effectiveness of CRM and the use of social media in the firm, (2) the higher the upper management support and sales personnel capabilities, the higher the sales business process capabilities of the firm, and (3) sales business process capabilities fully mediate the relationship between technology utilization and sales performance. Managerial implications of how CRM and social technologies integrate with process capabilities to deliver higher performance are discussed.