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Bocconi Scholars Awarded by the Sales Education Foundation

, by Fabio Todesco
Paolo Guenzi and Sarah Ghaddar's research program on the adoption of social media among sales professionals has been assigned a Neil Rackham Research Grant

The Sales Education Foundation (SEF) has assigned a $5,000 research grant to Paolo Guenzi, Associate Professor at Bocconi's Department of Marketing, and Sarah Ghaddar, Research Fellow at SDA Bocconi School of Management, for their research program Social Media and Sales: Investigating the Antecedents and Impacts of Social Media Usage among Sales Professionals.

SEF, established in 2007, aims at elevating the sales profession through university education, by funding sales specific research and supporting the development of sales education in universities. The Neil Rackham Research Grant Program, named after the author of the best-seller Spin Selling, assigns a limited number of awards to academic researchers. As SEF is deeply rooted in North America, a grant given to European scholars is an important acknowledgment of sales studies' quality at Bocconi.

The award-winning research program investigates social media usage among sales professionals and its impact on their performance through a large-scale survey of Italian sales professionals. "There's a lot of theoretical, strategic literature on digital transformation, but a scarcity of empirical analysis of its effects on sales professionals", Prof. Guenzi says. "Technologies are too often seen as a shortcut to top performances, but according to our data salespeople on average still contribute 80-90% of overall turnover of companies and scientific studies on the impact of digital tools and social media on salespeople's results have shown little or no correlation. It makes sense, thus, to empirically analyze how and to what extent digital tools and social media are used by salespeople and what consequences this generates. We also want to understand what organizational conditions generate positive economic returns on the investments made to introduce and stimulate the usage of social media by salespeople".

Some preliminary results of the research, conducted at SDA Bocconi's Commercial Excellence Lab, will be presented on 17 October at the Digital & Social Selling Index workshop (in Italian).

CLICK HERE to download the research project.

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