Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Australasian Marketing Journal

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ausmj

Investigating salesperson performance factors: A systematic review of

the literature on the characteristics of effective salespersons
Halimin Herjanto a, Drew Franklin b,∗
a
Marist College, United States
b
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Business and consumer buying behaviour has changed dramatically in recent time; a fact that is not lost
Received 10 December 2018 on selling organisations when considering how best to recalibrate salesperson performance measures in
Accepted 10 December 2018
response. However, a contemporary, systematic review of the academic literature concerning those most
Available online 2 January 2019
effective salesperson performance factors is markedly absent. This study joins a long line of investiga-
Keywords: tory efforts regarding the characteristics and habits of successful salesperson performance by adopting
Sales performance factors meta-analysis techniques to investigate the salesperson performance literature, content-analysing over
Salesperson effectiveness 250 published articles from 1986 to 2017 and synthesising the findings into a new salesperson perfor-
Sales performance typology mance typology. The study finds that personal, organisational, co-worker, buyer and situational dimen-
Sales management sions are responsible for increasing salespersons’ performance. Additionally, this work offers a parsimo-
nious overview of current key salesperson performance research as well as a clear agenda for future
salesperson performance research.
© 2018 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

c h i n e s e a b s t r a c t

, .,  

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19862017250, 
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© 2018 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Today, the role of a salesperson has become even more critical
(Abeysekera and Wickramasinghe, 2013); it has evolved from
implementing the selling function to become a core value cre-
ator for customers and sales organisations (Zhang and Glynn,
2015). In addition, sales organisations require their salespeople to
deal with increasingly complex sales situations, persuade buyers
within increasingly competitive environments, build trust and
achieve overall organisational sales goals (Ahearne and Rapp,
2010; Franklin and Marshall, 2018). Given the importance of sales-
persons’ performance, many scholars have focused on identifying
a broad spectrum of components that affect salespersons’ perfor-
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: drew.franklin@aut.ac.nz (D. Franklin).
mance (Evans et al., 2012). Despite this significant effort, these
authors claim that the existing typologies are inconsistent and far
from perfect. This claim provides motivation for the present study;
a meta-analysis of the sales performance literature published over
the last 30 years, in an effort to generate a new salespersons’
performance typology and a more complete understanding of
the factors contributing to sales performance. The focus of this
study, then, is to conduct a thorough review of the literature on
salespersons’ performance published in peer reviewed journals, in
a variety of disciplines, between 1986 and 2017.
2. Previous salesperson performance typologies
There is a long history of relevant literature, commencing with
a much-cited work by Churchill et al. (1985) who investigated 116
published papers on salespersons’ performance between 1920 and
1984 and found six components responsible for producing higher

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ausmj.2018.12.001
1441-3582/© 2018 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112 105

Table 1
Comparison of existing salespersons performance typologies.

Churchill et al. Moncrief (1986) Farrell and Zolloco et al. Singh and Koshi Verbeke et al.
(1985) Hakstian (2001) (2009) (2010) (2011)

Context B2B + B2C B2B + B2C – B2B B2B B2B

Time frame 1920–1984 1986 1967–1998 2009 – 1982–2008
Number of journals reviewed 116 N/A N/A N/A – 268
Sample size N/A 800 28 20 N/A N/A
Factors considered
∗ ∗
Aptitude
∗ ∗ ∗
Skill level
∗ ∗ ∗
Sales effectiveness
∗
Customer orientation
∗ ∗ ∗
Personality/aptitude
∗ ∗
Motivation
∗
Creating/delivering value
∗
Working with orders
∗ ∗ ∗
Channel relationships
∗
Servicing the product/account
∗ ∗
Biographical information
∗
Role perception
∗ ∗
Maintaining satisfaction
∗
Organisational factors
∗
Information management
∗
Cognitive ability
∗
Closing ratio
Conference attendance, training,
entertaining

sales performance. As detailed in Table 1, these factors include a Table 2

A summary of academic journal sources involved in the present study.
general organisational aspect and then a number of personal and
motivational aspects (aptitude, skill level, personality, motivation Discipline Number of Number of
and role perception). Moncrief (1986) quickly followed Churchill journals papers
et al., interviewing 1393 salespersons and finding 10 important Marketing 27 119
sales activities that produce effective sales performance. These fac- Sales and selling 2 55
tors are quite different from those found in previous investigations Management 21 23
General business 15 29
and much less concerned with personal variables as with func-
Retailing 4 7
tional roles (sales effectiveness, working with orders, channel rela- Product strategy 2 2
tionships, servicing the product/account, information management, Psychology 8 19
and conference attendance, training, and entertaining). Human resource management 2 2
Tourism 2 2
This pattern of authors either stressing environmental and or-
4 6
ganisational or, alternatively, personal factors persists in the more Others: Organisational 17 22
contemporary sales performance literature. Of particular note is Behaviour, Ethics, Coaching,
the work of Verbeke et al. (2011) of whom, after investigating 268 Entrepreneurship, Performance,
published papers between 1982 and 2008, found that Churchill Finance, Communication, Real
Estate, Economic, Humanities,
et al.’s six proposed components of salespersons’ performance
Sociology, Assessment,
was as valid and relevant in 2011 as they were in 1985. Another Multidisciplinary, Creativity,
distinguishing feature of the various, more contemporary, models Administrative Science,
developed is the data source. Some models are reviews based Accounting
on published works (Churchill et al., 1985; Verbeke et al., 2011),
whilst some are based directly on primary data (Farrell and Haks-
tian, 2001; Moncrief et al., 1986; Zolloco et al., 2009). Additionally,
makes no general distinction between these terms. We define sales
although the early papers of Churchill et al. and Moncrief both
performance as the characteristics, activities and behaviours that
concern business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales
contribute to higher sales and profits for the selling organisation
situations, a cross-section of other works detailed in Table 1 are
and improve buyer–seller relationships. Although it is quite likely
specifically relevant to business-to-business sales situations.
that some relevant research has been omitted, Google Scholar al-
lows researchers to retrieve information from a range of databases
3. Research method (Falagas et al., 2008); as a result, researchers have access to wide
academic journal coverage (Jusco, 2008) and enjoy less bias in
3.1. Sample and source material journal selection (Noruzi, 2005). Following Ngai’s (2005) sugges-
tion, conference papers, proceeding papers, unpublished masters
A systematic literature research was conducted, using Google and doctoral dissertations, book chapters, textbooks, and work-
Scholar databases, by employing the following keywords; “sales- ing papers were excluded from the search. From this collection,
persons/salespeople/sales representative/salesman/key account abstracts and full papers were scanned and read by the authors
manager x performance/effectiveness.” This search resulted in to eliminate those that are not directly related to salespersons’
several thousand articles published between 1986 and 2017. performance. This screening process resulted in the inclusion of
Although it is clear that some studies distinguish between the 268 published papers in 104 academic journals. Table 2 presents a
term’s ‘performance’ and ‘effectiveness’ to some extent, this study summary of the academic domain, and respective quantity, of the
106 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112
Fig. 1. Antecedents of salespersons’ performance.
papers selected to help explicate the state of current salespersons
performance research. A complete list of the papers selected are
available from the authors upon request.
3.2. Procedure
A content analysis was conducted to identify and understand
themes, and trends, in salesperson performance research. Follow-
ing Herjanto and Gaur (2017), each included article was coded
for the independent variable of salespersons’ performance. In any
meta-analysis study, inter-coder reliability serves as a tool to ex-
amine the degree of agreement between coders and it is regarded
as one of the most important tools for testing validity (Feng, 2014).
Lombard et al. (2002) suggest that to ensure the validity of the
level of agreement between two coders, the acceptable minimum
threshold is 80%. This study’s reliability coefficient of the indepen-
dent variable was found to be 0.93 (p < .001).
4. Results
The results presented in Fig. 1 are organised under the themes
that emerged from the content analysis. They contain a mixture
of factor types, from the motivational type favoured by Churchill
et al. (1985) to the more environmental and organisational factors
stressed by Moncrief (1986). Specifically, these factors have been
thematically categorised, and include salesperson personal factors,
social intelligence factors, social competence factors, organisational
factors, co-worker factors, buyer factors and situational factors and
will be expounded-on, as follows.
4.1. Salesperson personal factors
Our analysis reveals that 129 of the 268 articles on salesper-
sons’ performance investigate the effect of a salesperson’s personal
factors on their performance. Such factors refer to individuals’ in-
ternal factors that help him/her to achieve their best performance.
This result suggests that salesperson personal factors are not only
the most widely investigated category in salesperson performance
studies, but are also considered a key ingredient in building a
good relationship with buyers, co-workers and other stakeholders
(Muir, 2007). To perform their job effectively, a salesperson must
effectively manage his/her social intelligence and social compe-
tency (Huitt and Dawson, 2011).
4.2. Social intelligence
Social intelligence refers to a salespersons’ ability to be socially
aware and socially skilful (Goleman, 2006). Such intelligence offers
social direction and informs social relationship norms (Hodgson,
2013) as well as helping salespersons to become more sensitive,
responsive and interested in identifying unique buyer needs and
situations (Kihlstrom and Cantor, 2011). Salespersons with a high
degree of social intelligence enjoy stable psychological characteris-
tics and are able to better control sales situations (Goleman, 2006).
Social intelligence is found to include personality factors, role and
self-identity factors and psychological and personal value factors.
4.2.1. Personality factors
Psychological factors are complex and include all the differ-
ent aspects of personality that affect salespersons (Churchill et al.,
1985). Personality signifies a salespersons’ inner compilation of
psychological traits that serve as a mechanism to deal with the
environment (Avila and Fern, 1986) and affects salespersons’ emo-
tions, attitudes and behaviours during buyer–seller interactions
(Bartkus et al., 2011). There are many ways to measure personal-
ity; however, most published articles on salespersons’ performance
measured salespersons’ personality through the “Big Five Person-
ality” framework developed by Barrick and Mount (1991) (Vinchur
et al., 1998). This well-known framework consists of extraversion
versus introversion; agreeableness versus aggressiveness; conscien-
tiousness versus carelessness; emotional stability versus anxious-
ness and openness versus closeness.
Each personality dimension consists of several traits such as
adaptation and attention to detail (Ahearne et al., 2008), creativ-
ity (Olalekan, 2009), competitiveness (Schrock et al., 2016), em-
pathy (McBane, 1995), machiavellianism (Aziz, 2005), polychronic-
ity (Fournier et al., 2013), sportsmanship, courtesy, helping (Mulki
et al., 2007), aptitude (Noor et al., 2001), consistency (Burroughs
and White, 1996), curiosity, daring, intelligence, obedience, respect
to tradition (Olalekan, 2009), consciousness (Warr et al., 2005),
assurance, insecurity, civility and recovery (Wallace and De Cher-
natony, 2009). These traits serve to assist professional salespersons
in identifying buyers’ unique needs.
Throughout multiple studies, Bartkus et al. (2011) investi-
gated salespersons’ performance through the Type A/B personal-
ity/behaviour dimension. Type A personality refers to aggressive,
organised and competitive individuals, while type B personality
refers to a more relaxed personality (Fui and Hassan, 2015). Al-
though Type A personality types were found to perform better
than Type B, Bartkus et al. (2011) noted that Type A salespersons
still clearly experience impatience, which can cause a relationship
with buyers to deteriorate.
4.2.2. Role and self-identity factors
To develop social intelligence, Biddle (1979) suggests that sales-
persons should learn their “role” and “self” identity. Role refers to
a salespersons’ social position and includes expectations of them-
selves and others (Biddle, 1979), while self-identity refers to at-
tributes that salespersons believe they must have because of their
role (Papi, 2010). A lack of self-identity prevents salespersons from
exercising commitment to their role and understanding them-
selves - generating both the wrong perception (Riordan and Shore,
1997) and unclear directions (Blick, 2013) to prospective buyers.
To avoid this situation, salespersons must conduct self-monitoring
exercises to develop introspection (Ricks et al., 20 0 0) and to im-
prove self-efficacy (Salleh and Kamaruddin, 2011), self-awareness,
self-regulation (Deeter-Schmelz and Sojka, 2003) and to motivate
self-development (Msweli-Mbanga and Lin, 2003). This way, self-
monitoring serves as a gateway to more effective sales perfor-
mance and improved competitiveness (Ricks et al., 20 0 0). Simi-
 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112
larly, a clear understating of role serves as a mechanism toward
helping salespersons to accomplish their desired goals. An unam-
biguous role provides clear expectations and promotes better role
accuracy, thus eliminating role ambiguity and role conflict (Noor
et al., 2001). Thus, the clearer the role perception, the less sales-
persons’ experience job stress (Miao and Evans, 2013). To reduce
stress, salespersons should also avoid role overload (Jones et al.,
2017) as it results in lower levels of job engagement (Miao and
Evans, 2013), lower performance (Mulki et al., 2007) and lower lev-
els of satisfaction with their supervisor (Jaworki and Kohli, 1991).
4.2.3. Psychological and personal value factors
Core psychological components, such as motivation (John et al.,
2012) and needs (Uduji and Ankeli, 2013), are referred to as intan-
gible characteristics that jointly influence salespersons’ behaviour
and help build the capacity for social living (Snow, 2010). Needs
are psychological factors that indicate salespersons have discrepan-
cies to fulfil. These needs include need for affiliation, achievement,
power (Uduji and Ankeli, 2013) and cognition (Sojka and Deeter-
Schmelz, 2008). To fulfil these needs, salespersons should seek to
accelerate their motivation (Schmitz and Ganesan, 2014), initiative
(Msweli-Mbanga and Lin, 2003), intention (Fu et al., 2010), job in-
volvement (Azizi et al., 2012), networking (Macintosh and Krush,
2017) and effort (Miao and Evans, 2013). These psychological fac-
tors thus serve as a trigger to work harder (Gneezy, 2002). This
highly-motivated tendency is guided by personal values (Schwartz,
1992). In general, successful salespersons have two major personal
values; a ‘self-regarding’ value which drives the individual to act in
their own interest, and an ‘other-regarding’ value which promotes
buyers’ welfare (Herjanto, 2013). This study shows that successful
salespersons possess a combination of ambitious, achievement and
power striving values (Olalekan, 2009) as well as the value of al-
truism (Msweli-Mbanga and Lin, 2003) to stay competitive.
Positive perceptions are another psychological component that
generates positive social intelligence (Winston et al., 2005). Sales-
persons’ positive perceptions of their appearance, attractiveness,
communication ability, likability and trustworthiness (Ahearne
et al., 1999), competitiveness (Schwepker and Ingram, 1994),
value orientation (Flaherty et al., 1999), organisational support
(Rutherford et al., 2011), ability to read a buyer’s mood (Deeter-
Schmelz and Sojka, 2003) and ability to demonstrate (Rapp et al.,
2015) all are claimed to improve sales performance (Noor et al.,
2001). One thing that is worth noting is that to maintain perfor-
mance, salespersons should also have fun and excitement in their
job (Swenson and Herche, 1994).
4.3. Social competence
Social competence reflects a salespersons’ ability to organise
appropriate responses to exposed stimuli in an ethical and bene-
ficial way (Bierman, 2004). Cohen (2006) suggests that social com-
petence comprises an ability to process cognitive, affective and
conative cues in an ethical manner.
4.3.1. Cognitive ability
Cognitive ability refers to salespersons’ knowledge and skills
(Beckmann, 2002), which are classified as declarative and proce-
dural knowledge (Sharma et al., 2007). Declarative knowledge re-
lates to salespersons’ skills in identifying different buyer attributes
in order to describe sales situations. In complex business transac-
tions, buyers experience uncertainty and high risk (Sharma et al.,
2007). To minimise this uncertainty and risk, salespersons should
“read” buyers’ emotional state and thoughts (Deeter-Schmelz and
Sojka, 2003), be adaptable (Miao and Evans, 2013), seek to serve
customers (Moncrief, 1986) and build good rapport with a buyer
(Agnihotri et al., 2016).
107
Means, or mechanisms, that have been explored toward this
end include being prompt (Fournier et al., 2013), demonstrating ef-
fective problem handling (Punwatkar and Varghese, 2014), effective
communication (Ahearne et al., 1999), effective listening (Ingram
et al., 1992), identifying nonverbal cues (Agnihotri et al., 2016), de-
termining buyers’ needs (Ingram et al., 1992), entertaining buyers
(Moncrief, 1986) and to some extent, controlling a selling situation
(Wong and Tan, 2016). In addition, Yang and Wu (2014) suggest
the ability to socialise effectively is an equally important cognitive
ability.
Procedural knowledge is a salespersons’ ability to utilise their
skills toward developing exceptional sales strategies. To be most
effective, salespersons need to be armed with adequate product
knowledge (Ingram et al., 1992), demonstrate business visibility
(Cron and Slocum, 1986), plan consistently well (Avila and Fern,
1986) and demonstrate strategic thinking and a general business
understanding learnt from experience (Burroughs and White, 1996;
Sharma et al., 2007). The most effective salespersons also exercise
good selling techniques, such as adaptive selling behaviour (Miao
and Evans, 2013), are service oriented (Keillor et al., 20 0 0), adopt
counselling-selling (Burroughs and White, 1996) and customer-
oriented selling (Schwepker and Good, 2011) techniques. The suc-
cess of these techniques also depends on a salespersons’ ability
to adopt and transfer technology embedded in products and ser-
vices (Reday et al., 2009), sales automation and CRM (Rodriguez
and Honeycutt, 2011) and social media (Rodriguez et al., 2012).
4.3.2. Affective ability
Affective ability refers to emotional experiences that are devel-
oped when salespersons are exposed to different sales situations,
and dilemmas, and can serve to impact a salespersons’ subsequent
behaviour and performance (Sojka and Deeter-Schmelz, 2008).
Salespersons with emotional stability are able to adjust their emo-
tional state to different selling situations (Vinchur et al., 1998) by
using their emotional intelligence (Huggins et al., 2015) in order
to avoid emotional exhaustion (Rutherford et al., 2011) and reduce
negative emotional contagion (McBane, 1995). This way, sales-
persons’ emotional intelligence reduces buyers’ emotional tension
and improves trustworthiness (Luccini et al., 2018; Huggins et al.,
2015).
4.3.3. Conative ability
The third component of social competency closely relates to
salespersons’ orientation (selling vs. buyer orientation). A selling
orientation focuses on short-term sales gains and negatively affects
salespersons’ overall performance. On the other hand, a buyer ori-
entation focuses salespersons’ intentions on satisfying their buy-
ers (Wachner et al., 2009). Such an orientation follows five steps:
Buyers’ needs identification; presentation and demonstration: ob-
jection handling; negotiation, and closing the sale (Homburg et al.,
2011). These steps allow salespersons to better understand their
buyers (Koc et al., 2008) and help buyers to determine how to
allocate resources toward the most suitable products or services
(Kara et al., 2013). During an orientation selection process, sales-
persons may experience an ethical dilemma that forces them to
exercise a level of moral judgment (Schwepker and Ingram, 1996).
Failure to exercise moral judgment typically produces a negative
performance (Schwepker, 2017), whereas confirming moral judg-
ments generate better relationships (Schwepker and Ingram, 1996)
and improves sales performance.
Personal factors also include demographic characteristics. Fac-
tors such as education (Salleh and Kamaruddin, 2011), gender
(Dion et al., 1997), culture (DeCarlo et al., 2007) and, to some ex-
tent, ethnicity (McKay et al., 2008) have been demonstrated to in-
fluence salespersons’ performance. This discussion highlights the
complex, multifaceted nature of salespersons’ personal factors and
108 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112
it is entirely reasonable that scholars have examined them so in-
tensively.
4.4. Organisational factors
Organisational factors refer to the components of organisations
and their administration that serve to support salespersons toward
achieving optimal sales performance. In this study, organisational
factors are classified into organisation and managerial factors.
4.4.1. Organisation factors
Organisational factors are further categorised into tangible and
intangible dimensions. Tangible dimensions consist of physical
items (i.e., quality products, technology, promotional items and re-
wards) that support the selling process. For example, besides pro-
ducing good quality products (Jan-Hultink et al., 20 0 0), organisa-
tions provide technology (Johnson and Bharadwaj, 2005) and other
resources (Harris et al., 2013) to benefit their customers.
To be effective, tangible dimensions interact with intangible di-
mensions to offer a robust system that has control over resources
(Workman et al., 2003) and offers clear organisational segmenta-
tion (Terho Eggert et al., 2015). Additionally, this system serves to
provide an appropriate and fair sales territory (Pitt and Price, 2010)
coupled with a challenging but achievable sales quota (Cravens et
al., 1993) as well as continuous training (Aziz, 2005). The speci-
ficity inherent in this system also serves to reduce internal task
complexity (Virtanen et al., 2015) and, as a result, provides for
excellent work spirituality (Malik et al., 2011). Finally, to ensure
this effectiveness persists, organisations should conduct total qual-
ity management (TQM) exercises (Craven et al., 1993) and offer
fair financial (John et al., 2012) and non-financial rewards, such as
product rewards (Djoni et al., 2016).
4.4.2. Managerial factors
It seems obvious, but organisations should feature effective
sales managers in order to drive sales performance. An effective
sales manager, however rarefied the exemplar may be in prac-
tice, refers to a manager who can control their salespersons and
organisations wisely (Chagalla and Shervani, 1996), who is trust-
worthy (Mackenzie et al., 2001) and able to adapt to the current
sales situation (Butler and Reese, 1991). For example, an effective
sales manager provides honest and critical feedback (Chakrabarty
et al., 2008), encourages diversity (McKay et al., 2008). Addition-
ally, (Challagala and Shervani, 1996) suggest an effective sales
manager exercises rewards and punitive authority effectively and
fairly and is able to provide clear direction (Jaramillo et al., 2009)
through a consultative approach (Pelha, 2006) within an effective
leader-member exchange program (Schwepker, 2017). Through this,
sales managers serve as transformational leaders (Mackenzie et al.,
2001) of whom salespersons are more willing to serve effectively
(Schwepker and Schulz, 2015).
4.5. Co-worker factors
Park and Deitz (2006) assert that the degree of collaboration
between co-workers improves relationship quality and sales per-
formance. The quality of such relationships improves salespersons’
tendency to seek interdepartmental collaborations (Workman
et al., 2003) in order to coordinate different types, and levels, of
expertise (Steward et al., 2010). Such a high level of coordination
improves team spirit (Workman et al., 2003), serving to unite
salespersons and create a sense of familial bonding between team
members. To maintain such a strong bond, salespersons help
each other by sharing buyers’ information and any selling related
information (i.e., competitions, trends etc.), offering honest and
constructive feedback on output and behavioural performance, and
being committed to each other’s success (Kohli and Jaworki, 1994).
Commitment leads to better marshalling of intra-organisation
resources, improves multilevel performance and creates better
team selling (Evans et al., 2012) and teamwork (Wallace and De
Chernatony, 2009). On the other hand, a high degree of complexity
in interdepartmental collaborations leads to salespersons’ failure to
focus and consequently reduces their performance (Virtanen et al.,
2015). In sum, the success of salesperson depends on synchro-
nised efforts across related departments and between co-workers
(Workman et al., 2003).
4.6. Buyer factors
It seems almost tautologous, but as the most important party
in buyer–seller relationships, buyers play a vital role in deter-
mining salespersons’ performance. Despite this importance, it is
surprising that within the literature collected for this study, the
authors found only six articles dedicated to discussing the role
of the buyer in these relationships. Buyer satisfaction represents
a positive overall evaluation of the products and generates a
positive attitude toward salespersons (Homburg et al., 2011). Such
satisfaction encourages buyers to exercise vulnerability, allowing
salespersons to access buyers’ available resources (i.e., financial,
expertise and information or ideas) for better engagement, re-
source integration and relationship development (Karpen and
Kleinaltenkamp, 2018; Zhang et al., 2013). In sum, buyer satisfac-
tion is regarded as the chief component in building a healthy and
fruitful buyer–seller relationship and serves as the key to buyers’
future collaboration (Virtanen et al., 2015).
To maintain buyer satisfaction, salespersons should ensure the
clarity of their sales role because a high level of role ambiguity
creates a negative mind set amongst buyers (Johlke and Iyer, 2013)
and changes buyers’ attitude and produces buyer incivility (Sliter
Sliter and Jex, 2012). Consequently, buyers become increasingly
rude, intolerant, impolite and negative. As a result, salespersons
experience emotion fatigue, burn out and a high level of stress. In
sum, buyers’ incivility can lead to difficult buyers or buyer resent-
ment (Wallace and De Chernatony, 2009), both of which results in
poor sales performance.
4.7. Situational factors
Situational factors are external aspects that may influence sales-
persons’ performance. Such factors are uncontrollable and exist
in any selling situation. One of the biggest situational factors
is sales territory characteristics. Each territory is different (Jan-
Hultink et al., 20 0 0) and requires different measurements, products
and approaches (Piling et al., 1999). Additionally, these markets are
not static but dynamic and volatile. Therefore, salespersons who
work in such markets are required to respond to these fast, and of-
ten unpredictable, changes to the needs and requirements of their
buyers. Additionally, the effective salespersons should be able to
predict these incoming changes (Jan Hultink et al., 20 0 0) with-
out experiencing high role ambiguity and role conflict (Azizi et al.,
2012). Thus, in order to anticipate such dynamic market changes,
salespersons should be more adaptable and work smarter (Holmes
and Srivastava, 2002) in an effort to improve job satisfaction (Kara
et al., 2013) and downstream sales performance.
5. Discussion; what we do not know about salespersons’
performance
The present study shows that a great many scholars have
expended considerable effort toward understanding the full gamut
of salespersons’ performance factors. However, although our
findings show that between 1986 and 2017 the investigation of
 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112 109

Table 3
A synthesised overview of salespersons performance literature between 1986 and 2017.

Antecedents of salespersons’ What we know about salespersons’ performance What we don’t know about salespersons’ performance
performance

Personal factors High performers have a good balance between social
intelligence and social competency.
A combination of salespersons’ personality, role and
self-identity, perceptions, motivation and needs and
personal values generate an ability to be socially aware
and socially skilful.
Salespersons’ ability to appropriately respond to
exposed stimuli is generated by their ability to
integrate cognitive, affective and conative skills.
Organisational factors Tangible and intangible organisational factors
contribute-to and optimise salespersons’ performance.
Transformational and servant leadership promote
higher sales performance.
Co-worker factors Collegiality improves performance through
interdepartmental collaborations, coordination of
different areas of expertise and a culture of teamwork.
Buyer factors Dissatisfied buyers tend to present with an emotional
response, such as rudeness and resentment.
Dissatisfied buyers lead to salespersons’ emotional
fatigue, burn out and stress.
Situational factors Different sales territories require different
measurements, products and approaches.
Sales market is volatile and unpredictable, not static.
How do different personality traits affect sales performance?
How do self-conscious emotions influence sales performance?
How do salespersons’ social intelligence and social
competency skills evolve in today’s business environment?
What are salespersons’ strategies to balance cognitive,
affective and conative skills during buyer–seller interactions?
How do salespersons’ deal with small and start-up
businesses?
How do SMEs’ policies, rewards and culture affect
salespersons’ performance?
How do salespersons’ deal with younger managers?
What is the influence of within-group, demographic-type
membership on co-worker collaboration (and vice versa)?
Do different industries require different types of co-worker
collaboration?
How do salespersons’ deal with buyers from different cultural
beliefs and/or different personality types?
How do salespersons’ deal with technologically savvy and
millennial buyers?
How does a dynamic and unpredictable business environment
affect performance?
Do salespersons have specific strategy to deal with dynamic
market environment?
What environment changes do salesperson need to know?

salespersons’ performance factors was robust and well-considered,
the investigations were rather imbalanced with many studies
capturing sales performance very broadly, or only interested in
a particular peripheral aspect of sales performance rather than
examining sales performance as a central concern from the outset.
As with any meta-analysis study, the present study has several
limitations. First, this study distilled-down, drew-from and content
analysed only 268 published articles. Thus, the findings are not
fully generalisable and are not a reflection of the full picture of
salespersons’ performance. The findings are also limited to five
salesperson performance antecedent categories and therefore may
not be relevant to other categories, such as online sales perfor-
mance. Finally, this present study excluded articles from books,
book chapters, proceedings, conference and working papers, dis-
sertations and conceptual published articles. The integration of
these may provide a new perspective and understanding of the
salespersons’ performance phenomenon. Table 3 presents a brief
summary of what scholars know and do not know about sales-
persons’ performance, thus identifying opportunities for further
useful research. Today, businesses are facing unique and even more
severe challenges. In response, businesses are employing advanced
technology such as artificial intelligence (Victor, 2018) and big data
analytics (Court, 2015) to improve their salespersons’ performance
and advance their businesses. Although scholars agree that these
new technologies are important, they do not fully understand
how such technology affects salespersons’ performance (Arli et al.,
2018). Therefore, further investigation on this topic is important.
5.1. Artificial intelligence (AI)
Officer at Salesforce (DeSisto, 2016), and Madhukar Kumar, Vice
President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle (Kumar,
2018), re-iterate that AI is unavoidable and has become an impor-
tant part of salespersons’ success. The extant literature reveals that
AI can serve as a sales training tool (Honeycutt et al., 2002) and
can help to maintain an interactive experience (Arli et al., 2018).
However, Arli et al. (2018) suggest that this understanding only
touches on the phenomenon and scholars have yet to investigate
and understand how AI will shape the future of salespersons’
day-to-day interactions and activities. Today, AI technology is
compatible with different computer systems and allows sales
organisations to embed this technology in their sales systems
(Schwartz, 2018). This means that AI can organise a salesperson’s
daily sales agenda, provide client related information, suggest
appropriate sales tactics and approaches and more importantly,
serve as a virtual agent that helps a salesperson to directly en-
gage with buyers. There is no doubt that this trend is changing
the buyer–seller relationship landscape, while at the same time
providing many questions for scholars to answer. For example,
to what extent will the adoption of AI affect the emotional re-
lationship between a salesperson and buyers? Will AI replace a
salesperson’s personal visit to buyers? To what extent should a
sales organisation adopt AI technology? What factors can affect
a salesperson’s AI adoption? To what extent can AI technology
motivate and improve a salesperson’s sales performance? How
will AI change the function of salespersons in the future? What
types of products, companies and industries will benefit from AI?
These are but a few of the many, multifaceted questions that both
academics and practitioners, alike, must investigate further.

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) was initially introduced
to the sales literature by Collins in 1984. Collins (1984) defined
AI as computer technology that can think like a human, and he
predicted that AI will help salespersons’ day-to-day selling issues.
Today, sales professionals such as Robert DeSisto, Chief Value
5.2. Big data analytics
It is a well-established fact that sales organisations collect, and
store, a massive amount of data relating to their buyers (Clark
et al., 2007) with the hope that this data will improve and satisfy
110 H. Herjanto and D. Franklin / Australasian Marketing Journal 27 (2019) 104–112
the relationship between sellers and buyers (Watson, 2014). De-
spite this effort, however, most organisations struggle to optimise
and utilise this data to its full potential (Tata Consultancy Services,
2013) and, therefore, nearly 90% of salespersons’ miss sales op-
portunities (Young, 2018). Because of this issue, MSI (MSI, 2008)
decided to target big data analytics as a research priority between
2008 and 2010. They recommended that scholars seek more
understanding of this phenomenon and suggested a number of
questions. For example, what strategy should salespersons utilise
to counter their limited ability to integrate their growing data
pool? What are the trade-off costs of massive buyer data? How do
these massive databases advance a salesperson’s strategy to build
more intimate relationships with buyers? Does this data help,
or hinder, buyer–seller co-creation? Finally, how do salespersons
capture, analyse and translate unstructured data such as videos,
texts and emoji into a meaningful narrative that serves to support
the buyer–selling relationship and downstream sales performance?
6. Conclusion and implications
The present study synthesises empirical insights on salesper-
sons’ performance factors from literature published between 1986
and 2017, offering a comprehensive review on what we know, and
don’t know, about the antecedents of salespersons’ performance.
Our findings reveal that personal, organisational, co-worker, buyer
and situational factors contribute to salespersons effectiveness.
Among these dimensions, the personal dimension is the most in-
vestigated, likely because this dimension is the most complex and
dynamic. Additionally, this study provides a personal guideline on
how salespersons’ can improve and balance their social intelligence
and social competency in order to cater to their buyers and co-
workers within different selling situations.
This study also offers professional guidelines to managers and
organisations on how to manage their businesses and work with
their salespersons toward increasing salesperson performance. In
addition, this study has identified insights into how salespersons
can persist in their effectiveness, over time. This study offers two
contributions to the literature. First, a comprehensive and contem-
porary research map of the antecedents of salespersons’ perfor-
mance factors featured in the academic literature over the last
30 years. Second, the identification of additional areas of future
empirical investigation of salespersons performance factors in the
modern sales era. Most pronounced of these calls for future inves-
tigation is that of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), big data
analytics and the influence of more cooperative, or collaborative,
efforts toward building a more persistent level of engagement and
resource mobilisation between firms (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2018);
a sentiment that is echoed in contemporary calls for more theo-
retical contribution to this area of sales theory (Hartmann et al.,
2018).
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