Bocconi Is a Top Player in Selling and Sales Management Studies

Bocconi's Department of Marketing is one of the driving forces in the globalization of selling and sales management (S&SM) studies. A field tightly controlled by American scholars and American universities until the '90s, S&SM has increasingly attracted the attention of non-US academics, according to a survey of the articles published between 2003 and 2007 in 19 scholarly journals, compared to a similar survey conducted for the 1993-1997 period.

Keith Richards (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), William Moncrief (Neeley School of Business) and Greg Marshall (Crummer Graduate School of Business) reckon, in Tracking and Updating Academic Research in Selling and Sales Management: A Decade Later, that 31.9% of the authors of S&SM studies in 2003-2007 were affiliated to non-US schools, versus 7.7% in the previous period. With five authors, Università Bocconi is the first European university in the ranking, and the second non-US school after Australia's Monash University.

"Bocconi's position would be even better", Department of Marketing's Gabriele Troilo says, "if I would have been counted with the two articles I wrote in the surveyed period. But I was on a sabbatical leave, I used two affiliations and the authors of the survey considered just the other one". The Bocconi authors are Paolo Guenzi (four articles) and, with one article each, Sandro Castaldo, Fabrizio Zerbini, Enzo Baglieri and Raffaele Secchi. The last two are not affiliated to the Department of Marketing, but wrote articles related to S&SM in that period.

"Since then", Troilo says, "our productivity has even increased and some of the journals we are publishing in have a very high citation index".