Determinants of salesforce effectiveness: perceptions of field managers versus senior sales executives

A mail survey administered to sales managers investigates the factors that influence the effectiveness of their sales organizations. The most important factors found are building long‐term relations, inter‐departmental co‐ordination, training for both salespeople and field managers and information capabilities. Differences among the respondents are based on seniority as well as firm‐level performance. High performance firms and field managers consider team selling to be the most important determinant of salesforce effectiveness.