Alternative Mechanisms Guiding Salespersons’ Ambidextrous Product Selling
| Author | Michel Borgh,Ad Jong,Edwin J. Nijssen |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12148 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 28, 331–353 (2017)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12148
Alternative Mechanisms Guiding
Salespersons’ Ambidextrous Product Selling
Michel van der Borgh, Ad de Jong1and Edwin J. Nijssen
Eindhoven University of Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, PO Box
513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and 1Aston Business School, Marketing Group, Aston Triangle,
Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK
Corresponding author email: a.de-jong@aston.ac.uk
Ambidextrous product-selling strategies, in which companies’ salespeople concurrently
pursue the sale of existing and new products, are hard to implement. Previous studies
have addressedthis issue for relatively simple consumer settings with the manager in close
proximity to the salespersons and focusing on dierent levelsof control and autonomy to
resolve this issue. However, little is known about how field salespeople can be influenced
to pursue such dual goals proactively for morecomplex business-to-business products. In
this study, the authors distinguish between salespeople’s proactive selling behaviour for
new and existing products, and studythe impact of two alternative mechanisms: a situa-
tional mechanism (i.e. perceived manager product-sellingambidexterity) and a structural
mechanism (i.e. salesperson organizational identification). Using a time-lagged, multi-
source data set from a large ambidextrous company, the authors demonstrate that both
mechanisms contribute to salespeople’s proactive selling of new and existing products,
but also act as each other’s substitutes. The results suggest two most likely strategiesfor
salespeople to obtain overall sales targets: focusing on existingproduct selling; or acting
ambidextrously. The latter approach oers the benefits of better achieving ambidextrous
company sales goals and of greater performance stability, and is thus preferred.
Introduction
Salespeople play a decisive role in the successful
implementation of a firm’s ambidextrous product-
selling strategy. Such a strategy requires a simulta-
neous focus on the sale of existing products(i.e. ex-
ploitative selling) and on the sale of the company’s
next generation of products for the market (i.e.
explorative selling). However, anecdotal evidence
points to companies’ frequent failure to imple-
ment such a strategy, because eectively combin-
ing existing and new product-selling activities in
the frontline is often dicult (Leslie and Holloway,
2006). With nearly half of all business-to-business
(B2B) sales leaders emphasizing that salespeople
The authors thank JanWieseke, JeroenSchepers, Michael
Ahearne and Martha Chorney for their comments on pre-
vious versions of this article.
need improvement in eectively introducing new
products to the market alongside current product
oerings (Dicky and Trailer, 2014), the problem
seems most prevalent in complex B2B marketsand
sales settings.
Previous studies (Ahearne et al., 2010;
Atuahene-Gima, 1997) have suggested that
sales people favour sales of either current or
new products. In some companies, salespeople
and customers immediately tend to shift their
attention to next-generation products (e.g. Oracle,
Fujitsu, and IBM’s cloud-based solutions; Kovar,
2010), neglecting the sale of current products,
which sometimes even leads customers to cancel
or defer orders for current products. In other
cases, however, salespeople are more conservative.
Confronted with customers reluctant to adopt
new products (e.g. Veritas Software; Leslie and
Holloway, 2006), they favour focusing on selling
current products with more certain routes to
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
332 M. van der Borgh, A. de Jong and E. J. Nijssen
success, than new unproven products. Both sce-
narios are undesirable, since pursuing new product
sales at the expense of existing product sales is
harmful to a firm’s ‘bread and butter’, while the
opposite scenario poses threats of stagnation and
complacency.
Recent research shows that in certain settings,
firms can successfully implement an ambidextrous
strategy at the organizational frontline. For ex-
ample, Jasmand, Blazevic and De Ruyter (2012)
demonstrate that ambidextrous behaviour of ser-
vice employees in call centres (i.e. combining ser-
vice and sales activities) leads to positive outcomes,
including more synergy, greater customer satisfac-
tion and better sales performance.In addition, Van
der Borgh and Schepers (2014) show that, in a re-
tail setting, an ambidextrous product-selling strat-
egy can lead to positive outcomes, revealing that
sales managers who pursue an ambidextrous sales
strategy–using mechanisms such as autonomy and
performance feedback – generatehigher profitsper
salesperson.
Although these previous studies have provided
valuable insights into the role of ambidexterity
in a sales context, their results are limited to
situations where employees are in close proximity
to their managers and operate in relatively simple
consumer settings (e.g. Jasmand, Blazevic and De
Ruyter, 2012; Van der Borgh and Schepers, 2014).
However, B2B field salespeople typically work
in more complex settings characterized by lower
levels of manager monitoring of their day-to-day
activities (Spiro, Rich, and Stanton, 2007), where
most work behaviours cannot be described in
advance (Schmitz and Ganesan, 2014). Unable to
anticipate and control the diversity of problems
encountered by salespeople in the field, managers
must rely on subordinates’ ‘local knowledge’
and self-starting proactive behaviours to address
those problems. So, proactive selling behaviour
from salespeople is required, consisting of taking
initiative and anticipating opportunities in selling
products (Belschak, Den Hartog, and Fay, 2010;
Strauss, Grin and Raerty, 2009). The question
is which other eective guiding mechanisms can
be used?
This study addresses this question and posits
that, to reach ambidextrous sales goals under
these conditions, organizations need to take into
account a wider set of organizational guidance
mechanisms. Specifically, they should consider
mechanisms beyond the role of the sales manager
and the level of alignment required for success. We
make three important contributions.
First, we extend previous studies examining am-
bidexterity at the frontline under close supervision
(e.g. call centre; retailstores) to more complex B2B
field settings.Consistent with this, we switch from a
manager-initiated control perspective (e.g. auton-
omy provided by the manager) to an employee-
initiated control perspective (Hartline, Maxham
and McKee, 2000). We focus on proactive sell-
ing behaviour, which refers to taking initiative in
selling products, anticipating opportunities rather
than threats, and persisting in the sale of prod-
ucts until customers have adopted them (e.g. Pitt,
Ewing and Berthon, 2002). Based on the ambidex-
terity literature, we distinguish between two types
of proactive behaviour at the individual salesper-
son level – namely, salesperson proactive selling of
new and existing products – and conceptualize and
develop measurement scales for both types.
Second, we add to research on frontline am-
bidexterity by simultaneously examining the im-
pact of two guidance mechanisms: salesper-
son’s organizational identification (OI) and sales
manager’s product-selling ambidexterity. Man-
ager product-selling ambidexterity is a situational
mechanism that actively directs attention and ef-
fort, while a salesperson’s OI is an underlying
structural mechanism that guides employee think-
ing and behaviour (Wieseke et al., 2007). Salesper-
son’s OI and the manager together are critical fac-
tors in motivating peripheral employees (Wieseke
et al., 2009). Both types of mechanisms influence
proactive behaviour (Strauss, Grin and Raerty,
2009), but it remains unknown how these mech-
anisms operate and interact in situations where
proactive behaviour is at the discretion of the em-
ployee. We explore their interplay by examining
the potential for substitution (as the eect of one
mechanism decreases, the level of the other mech-
anism increases; e.g. Siggelkow, 2002) or com-
plementarity (both mechanisms strengthen each
other’s eects).
Finally,we extend previous studies on ambidex-
terity in the frontline oering a detailed view of
the impact of selling behaviour on individuals’
objective sales performance. Given that sales tar-
gets are often directly derived from strategic sales
goals (e.g. increase in market share or shareholder
value), it is important to understand how individ-
ual salespeople’s allocation of behavioural eort
can contribute to the firm’s ultimate performance
© 2015 British Academy of Management.
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