Managing the Structure of Salesperson Social Capital in the Customer Relationship

When: Thursday, September 17, 2020, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Where: Online, Microsoft Teams

Speaker: Professor Stephan Henneberg

This research webinar is hosted by the Business Ecosystems Research Group (BERG), in collaboration with the Marketing Interactions and Consumer Behaviour Research Group (MICB)

While a salesperson’s relationship networks with customers are a pivotal driver of performance, there is little guidance on how these connections should be managed and structured. This is important because interaction resources and opportunities are limited and interaction needs are changing, requiring salespeople to make trade-off decisions allocating these resources across their customers. The authors draw on social capital theory to conceptualize and analyse these interactions as distinct factors of structural social capital – frequency and configuration of interactions – in salesperson-customer relationships across time. In particular, the study conceptualises and assesses distinct types of structural social capital configurations in such salesperson-customer relationships. Using CRM data from 2,934 salesperson-customer relationships over seven consecutive quarters, random coefficient growth models show the differential impact of these factors for affecting sales performance as they evolve over time.