Hunting for new customers: Assessing the drivers of effective salesperson prospecting and conversion

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use this paper as evidence about hunting for new customers: assessing the drivers of effective salesperson prospecting and conversion in the stated context; compare its population, treatment and outcome with your own decision.

Reported result

What the study found

Prospecting and conversion have an implicit trade-off with a sweet spot maximizing acquisition. More-experienced salespeople acquired fewer new customers; advertising support and extrinsic rewards improved conversion more for experienced reps.

Research question

What the authors investigated

What does hunting for new customers: assessing the drivers of effective salesperson prospecting and conversion show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?

Design

Objective sales-funnel data analyzed with negative-binomial and beta regression models. The study estimates drivers of prospecting efficacy (leads) and conversion efficacy (customers) using motivation-opportunity-ability variables, advertising support, extrinsic rewards, and salesperson experience.

Sample and setting

Objective prospecting/conversion performance data from multiple divisions of one firm; the authors describe the setting as entrepreneurial selling where salespeople acquire customers.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

Authors state that obtaining data from multiple divisions limited the study to a single firm, limiting generalizability; they recommend testing other entrepreneurial selling contexts. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.

Research sources

Candidate study metadata and reported evidence were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; the full article was not independently reviewed.