Journal of International Marketing

As companies expand their international footprint, insight regarding how to effectively organize international selling and sales management (ISSM) efforts is becoming increasingly important. Unfortunately, most prior research on personal selling and sales management is grounded in a domestic market perspective, which limits the relevance of its findings to situations in which sales activities occur between stakeholders located in different national markets. This special issue responds to the need for dedicated research on ISSM through six articles that explore phenomena arising from the interaction between international salespeople and international customers and their domestic counterparts. Moreover, this editorial builds on these six articles to advance a research agenda rooted in an interaction-based conceptualization of the ISSM field that identifies areas of inquiry related to international salespeople, international customers, and international managers, and subsequently prioritizes these research opportunities using input provided by sales practitioners. This special issue and editorial thus identify critical, underexplored research topics in the ISSM domain that are accompanied by a series of illustrative examples of how best to contribute to this emerging but important literature stream.

This research addresses a challenge within cross-national surveys of salespeople and sales managers: systematic differences between respondents from different countries in their interpretation of response categories associated with survey items measuring a construct of interest. As a result of these discrepancies in interpretation, analyses based on uncorrected survey responses may yield misleading results. The authors mathematically demonstrate the issue and then, drawing on the literature in education and political science, demonstrate a potential solution, the use of anchoring vignettes, which possesses substantial appeal in contexts where a researcher is interested in comparing construct means across contexts where intergroup differences would otherwise make such comparisons problematic. The authors use the proposed method on data from a cross-national survey of 1,051 salespeople and 163 sales managers across three countries (Brazil, Japan, and the United Kingdom) to evaluate self-assessments and upward assessments of a sales manager's drive. The findings highlight the importance of correcting for systematic differences in survey responses driven by cross-national differences, especially when the goal is to compare construct means. Further, the authors demonstrate the value of anchoring vignettes concerning several analytical goals relevant to academics and practitioners.

Customer success (CS) management is being implemented across global business markets. CS management is unique, as it exists within a broader CS community of professionals who actively support the new customer management practice. However, academic research has yet to investigate nonfirm epistemic communities (i.e., knowledge communities related to a specific domain) that support CS management and how they differ across geographic settings in ways that may affect the overall practice of CS management. To address this gap, the authors investigate how the CS community is implemented across countries that vary in their levels of uncertainty avoidance. The authors focus on the CS community and its impact on CS management operational factors that represent people, process, and performance factors of CS management. Following a phenomenological approach, interviews from the United States, Brazil, and Portugal drive the findings and indicate different levels of reliance on the external CS community to guide internal CS management operational factors. This research contributes by establishing the importance of the CS community and by uncovering insights based on CS managers’ perceptions of the CS community and its effect on CS management operational factors. The authors offer salient insights into how managers can optimize CS management operational factors, and they provide a discussion of future research topics.

Although rapid technological development has resulted in the proliferation of digital platforms, there is limited understanding of these platforms’ roles in international markets. Drawing on the information economics perspective, the authors investigate whether live streaming, as an emerging platform-based function, enables foreign sellers to enhance their sales performance in host markets. Using a unique longitudinal data set from a business-to-customer digital platform in China, the authors find that live streaming use is positively associated with international seller sales performance. This positive effect is stronger when cultural distance is higher. Moreover, the influence becomes stronger when product price is higher, while the effect is weaker for name-brand products than for non-name-brand products. These findings provide rich insights on the role of digitalization to the international marketing literature.

Salespeople are increasingly required to navigate an international environment—having international customers or international peers. However, much remains to be learned about how salespeople are utilizing social media in an international context. This multimethod, multistudy design contributes to international sales research by showing how business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use social media whether they are in a multinational or local firm. With a social capital lens, the authors explore the importance of social media with regard to strengthening salespeople's internal and external connections in an international context. In Study 1, 131 B2B salespeople use social media to develop customer relations (i.e., external connections) to engage in positive publicity and social media advocacy, ultimately leading to better sales performance. Specifically, social media advocacy enhances sales performance only for salespeople in multinationals. In Study 2, with 23 qualitative interviews, the authors contextualize the findings of Study 1 by comparing social media use among salespeople in multinational and local firms. The basis of the exploration involves internal and external connections with the three dimensions of social capital: structural, relational, and cognitive. The authors demonstrate that internal connections with peers on social media allows for increased knowledge transfer and other benefits.

Although price increases are common in business-to-consumer and business-to-business (B2B) markets, research examining the consequences of price increases on financial performance outcomes in B2B contexts is scarce. This study takes a relationship perspective on price increases and examines how a portfolio price increase affects the financial performance of the customer relationship and whether and how this effect varies between international business customers from different cultures. Based on objective data from 966 international B2B customers of a chemical goods company, this study examines a large-scale field intervention. Results show that higher portfolio price increases, although rooted in an increase of upstream costs, bring more severe harm to B2B customers’ sales revenue than lower portfolio price increases. These consequences vary with customers’ cultures as B2B customers with culture-specific communal norms are more susceptible to the magnitude of portfolio price increases than customers without such norms. International B2B companies, therefore, need to refrain from implementing uniform price increases and should consider their business customers’ cultural origin when designing and implementing price increases.

While interfunctional collaboration remains well-studied within the marketing literature, this research is the first to empirically explore the effects of sales–supply chain management (S-SCM) collaboration among salespeople selling internationally. Survey data from 310 international salespeople provide initial empirical evidence showing that S-SCM collaboration can positively predict international salesperson performance outcomes. To show that the effect is unique and provide rare empirical evidence, the authors simultaneously account for the effects of multiple forms of cross-functional collaboration (i.e., sales–marketing collaboration and sales–research and development collaboration). Matching the survey responses with objective country-level data, the authors also find that the value of S-SCM collaboration varies across countries. In particular, the positive effects of S-SCM collaboration were amplified by logistics capacity (or “logistics friendliness”) at the country level. The study's findings also indicate that the positive performance returns provided by S-SCM collaboration are even stronger for international salespeople focused on customer acquisition (vs. customer retention). Broadly, the study implies that, for optimal firm performance, those who are responsible for managing global supply chains should coordinate activities with those responsible for selling to global customers.