Whether, When, How, and Why Sales Managers Should Be Involved in Sales Teams

This article examines whether, when, how, and why sales managers should get involved in customer exchanges as members of sales teams. It does so by drawing on the literature on status and deference in teams to advance novel hypotheses and testing them across seven main studies. Results of Study 1—based on a multisource dataset involving over 5.5 million business-to-consumer exchanges—indicate that a sales manager's involvement as a member of a sales team enhances the team's performance ( whether ). These performance-enhancing effects are stronger for new customers relative to returning customers ( when ). To address how managers should engage when involved in sales teams, the article introduces the concept of selling position primacy and demonstrates that performance is enhanced when sales managers take a secondary, rather than a primary, selling position within the team. Experimental results across several settings (e.g., automotive services, retail clothing, and kitchen showroom) reinforce these findings and further identify customer-perceived team status and customer orientation as the mechanisms explaining why sales manager involvement and selling position primacy impact sales performance.