Paolo Guenzi Wins an Award at ANZMAC 2013

Paolo Guenzi (Department of Marketing and SDA Bocconi) is the recipient of the Best Paper Award for the Retailing & Sales track at ANZMAC2013, the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Marketing Academy.

The award winning paper, How Sales Capabilities Affect Performance: a Preliminary Investigation, is an output of Global Sales Barometer, a research financed by SDA Bocconi and, in the words of the award motivation, "is a comprehensive study of sales organizations which addresses an important area of business that is too often overlooked. It makes a very good contribution to the debate on the role and importance of selling in a modern business".

Using a sample of 214 companies in Italy, Guenzi empirically examines how sales capabilities influence a firm's sales growth and profitability. The study makes two important contributions. First, it extends the capability debate to sales. Building on the resource-based theory (RBT) and sales literature, the author develops a theoretical framework linking a firm's sales force management and personal selling capabilities with the two primary components of market performance - organic sales growth and profitability. Second, it adds to the sales literature. Traditionally focused on the role of individual salespeople in affecting organizational performance or on single sets of capabilities (e.g. control, motivation, etc.), few studies have addressed sales organizations' comprehensive sets of sales capabilities. The author is helping by simultaneously investigating a wide range of organizational capabilities at different levels (from sales management to personal selling) and exploring which capabilities contribute to performance.