ARC: Community: ELMAR: Posting areas: sales: call

Related ARContent: European J Mar

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Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:25:56 -0000
From: "James Rand" <JRand@emeraldinsight.com>

European Journal of Marketing

Special issue call for papers

The Sales Function in the 21st Century: Evolutions and Revolutions

While some commentators argue that the craft of selling has remained essentially the same since ancient times, many others have observed rapid changes in the way selling is done and managed in the 21st century. Some of the forces of change have been the internationalisation of the sales force in a virtually borderless Europe and an increasingly globalised world economy, a move toward consultative and relationship selling, hypercompetition in many industries, the gradual replacement of personal selling through internet sales in some industries, heightened customers’ price sensitivity, an increased emphasis on customer value and customer co-creation, greater need for interfunctional cooperation, and others.

This Special Issue of the European Journal of Marketing seeks to explore these developments and how they impact on the sales function in a European and international context. It specifically invites contributions that explore how sales forces are successfully managed in the face of these changes and how the skills, competencies and behaviours of salespersons can be adapted to the new challenges.

Issues that could be explored include, but are not limited to:

• The evolution of sales force roles
• Value creation and relationship building in the buyer-seller interface
• Change management in the sales function
• Integrating sales strategies and corporate strategies
• Strategic partnerships in sales
• Efficient customer value delivery through managing cross-functional relationships between sales and other departments
• Key Account Management
• Organizational issues in sales force design
• Managing the international sales force
• Designing and managing multi-channel sales structures, for example:
• Integrating off-line and on-line selling
• Integrating inside and outside selling
• New strategies for salespeople’s recruitment and selection
• How to respond to new challenges in salespeople’s capabilities through sales force training
• Motivating the sales force in the 21st century
• Innovative perspectives in goal setting and performance evaluation and appraisal
• Leadership in sales management
• Measuring return on investment in sales
• Sales force control systems in the era of relationship selling
• Sales accountability
• Selling and ethics, selling and corporate social responsibility

Deadline for submission to this Special Issue is Friday June 1st 2007. Publication is expected in late 2008. Contributions can be both conceptual and empirical in nature and should follow the European Journal of Marketing guidelines available from this website or in the back of any hard copy of the journal. Submissions (and any questions) should be sent as an email attachment to one of the Special Issue Editors on or before the deadline:

Dr Susi Geiger
Marketing Group
University College Dublin Business School
Carysfort Avenue
Blackrock, Co Dublin, Ireland.
Tel. +353 1 7168959
Fax +353 1 7168019
Email: susi.geiger@ucd.ie

Dr Paolo Guenzi,
Department of Marketing
Bocconi University
SDA Bocconi School of Business
Via Bocconi 8
20136 Milano, Italy
Email: paolo.guenzi@sdabocconi.it

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