Industrial Marketing Management

Special Issue on
Understanding the Theory and Practice of Team Selling

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline for Submission: December 31, 2016

Firms increasingly rely on sales teams to conduct the essential sales work needed to create and appropriate value from customers in business markets. Specifically, salespeople often work together not only with people from other functions inside their companies but also with people from partnering firms in a larger network. The growth in complex market offerings and solution-based selling has only amplified the need for sales leaders to implement team-based approaches. Yet, the processes for organizing and managing sales teams are not well understood. Given the paucity of research in the area, this Special Issue invites scholars to submit their best work on sales team management. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Understanding and conceptualizing sales team constructs to represent collective and multilevel concepts (e.g., opportunism, within team market knowledge)
• Intra-team processes (e.g., planning, communication, work allocation, etc.)
• Managerial antecedents and moderators for successful sales teams
• Structural considerations (e.g., functional diversity, personnel diversity, locational factors – co-location vs. geographical dispersion, account manager ownership, sales team incentives, technology complementarity)
• Situational factors and their impact on sales team effectiveness and efficiency
• Conceptualization and operationalization of sales team performance measures
• Sales teams across networks
• Sales teams and demand management
• Impact of supply chains on sales team structure and operations

In this special issue, we seek original contributions that can make a strong impact on sales team management theory and practice in industrial situations. We are open to any type of manuscript (conceptual or empirical) that has a strong theoretical background as well as to any type of research method (qualitative or quantitative).

Manuscript Preparation and Submission

Manuscripts should comply with the scope, standards, format and editorial policy of the Industrial Marketing Management. Manuscripts must be submitted through the IMM editorial site http://ees.elsevier.com/imm/ as instructed on the site using the classification SI: Sales Team Theory and Practice. All papers will be reviewed through the standard double-blind peer review process of IMM. In preparation of their manuscripts, authors are asked to follow the Author Guidelines closely. A guide for authors, sample articles and other relevant information for submitting papers are available at:

https://www.elsevier.com/journals/industrial-marketing-management/0019-8501/guide-for-authors

Guest Editors

Ryan Mullins
Clemson University
College of Business and Behavioral Science
U.S.A.
Email: rmullin@clemson.edu

Nick Panagopoulos
The University of Alabama
Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration
U.S.A.
e-mail: npanagopoulos@cba.ua.edu

---