Johannes Habel

• Dr. rer. oec., Diplom-Kaufmann
• Professor (Associate) at University of Houston

Business‐to‐business (B2B) sellers are increasingly transitioning to hybrid sales structures, by augmenting an in‐person field sales force with a direct online channel. During this transition, sellers frequently experience a cold‐start problem, wherein existing customers are either not acquainted with the online channel or unconvinced of its useful...

Organizations face a considerable challenge in determining the appropriate balance between inside and outside salespeople, largely due to the uncertain effects that a high dependence on inside salespeople has on firm performance. To address this challenge, we employ a multimethod research design, combining a qualitative theories-in-use approach wit...

Many business-to-business sales firms use automated lead nurturing (ALN) systems, which track leads’ online behavior and nurture them through personalized content. ALN software providers claim that ALN improves lead conversion, but whether this benefit materializes is unclear. Therefore, this research examines ALN’s effect across one qualitative an...

Customers would frequently benefit from changes to an existing purchase contract with a supplier (e.g., due to a wrong order). Salespeople can voluntarily make such a change, which we label a “customer-centric contract change.” Formally, we define a customer-centric contract change as an act of a salesperson of amending the purchase contract in the...

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 fin...

The scholarly literature at the intersection of sales and ethics is vast and, therefore, difficult to summarize. To explore the state of the sales–ethics landscape, the authors apply probabilistic topic modeling to a dataset composed of 293 journal articles published from 1980 to 2022. The critical examination of the results leads to a framework th...

Research primarily explores sales phenomena during normal periods. However, triggering events (e.g., natural disasters, security catastrophes, pandemics) can create sales system shocks that profoundly impact salespeople. We utilize a grounded theory and theories-in-use approach to develop a theory of sales system shocks. The framework conceptualize...

Many sales leaders support competition among their employees. However, inducing competition among peers may exhibit beneficial, motivating as well as harmful, exhausting effects, and which of the two countervailing effects prevails remains an open question. Drawing on the job-demand resources model and 20 interviews with sales professionals, this s...

Given the pervasive ubiquity of data, sales practice is moving rapidly into an era of predictive analytics, using quantitative methods, including machine learning algorithms, to reveal unknown information, such as customers’ personality, value, or churn probabilities. However, many sales organizations face difficulties when implementing predictive...

This book examines global strategies for industrial champions. In particular, it highlights three categories of supply in industrial markets: premium products, low-price products, and complex digital solutions. The authors identify opportunities for creating synergies between these three strategies and address the overarching question: How can the...

Industrial manufacturers are increasingly developing and marketing industrial software systems (ISS) in addition to their traditional hardware-based products. ISS are complex market offerings with a software core complemented by services that enable industrial customers to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their value creation processes...

Sales managers are unlikely to reap the benefits of implementing predictive analytics applications when salespeople show aversion to or lack understanding of these applications. For managers, it is essential to understand which factors mitigate or exacerbate these challenges. This article investigates these factors by studying the implementation of...

Business‐to‐business (B2B) sellers are increasingly transitioning to hybrid sales structures, by augmenting an in‐person field sales force with a direct online channel. During this transition, sellers frequently experience a cold‐start problem, wherein existing customers are either not acquainted with the online channel or unconvinced of its useful...

Extant literature has studied how customer–salesperson price negotiations evolve in “normal” circumstances. However, recent economic recessions illustrate the need to advance theory on the question of how price negotiations evolve in “abnormal” times when customer demand significantly contracts beyond expected variation. In response to this gap in...

A recent study of a selling strategy adapted by some retail salespeople recommended that salespeople should expeditiously disengage from a customer interaction when they believe that a customer with whom they are interacting is unlikely to make a purchase (Cron et al. 2021 Cron, William, Sascha Alavi, Johannes Habel, Jan Wieseke, and Hanaa Ryari. 2...

Transformational (TFL) and transactional leadership (TAL) are foundational leadership styles in sales practice and have been intensively studied by past sales research. However, prior research conflicts on the effectiveness of TFL and TAL to help salespeople cope with the persisting changes of a global pandemic, such as COVID-19. Combining leadersh...

Consumers care about the fairness of companies both in terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement and the fairness of prices. However, the interplay between these domains is not yet well understood. Therefore, this study examines how consumers’ perceptions of CSR engagement affect their perceived price fairness following a price incr...

The beginning and the end of the sales cycle, canvassing (i.e., approaching new customers) and closing (i.e., the process of trying to sign and finalize a deal), represent key moments of potential rejection. While these moments can induce significant stress and are prone to avoidance and procrastination (Bagozzi and Verbeke 2020; DeCarlo and Lam 20...

User-generated content, particularly online product reviews by customers, provide marketers with rich data of customer evaluations of product attributes. This study proposes, benchmarks, and validates a new approach for inferring attribute-level evaluations from user-generated content. Moreover, little is known about whether and when insights from...

Although customer orientation is widely endorsed as a crucial salesperson characteristic, little is known about its effect in price negotiations with customers. This study rectifies this omission and argues for its ambiguous effects. While customer-oriented salespeople create value for customers that enables them to reduce price concessions, they m...

Although consumer stockpiling is a prevalent phenomenon under the threat of a disaster, little is known about its underlying mechanisms. Leveraging consumer interviews, we build a theoretical framework that identifies two major motives for stockpiling: fear and expectations of a supply shortage. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a viable context, thro...

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak a pandemic. In the following days, media reports showed that consumers increasingly stockpiled groceries and household supplies. Interestingly, behavioral data show that this stockpiling exhibited considerable heterogeneity across countries. Building on cu...

Complex service innovations constitute a cornerstone in the strategy of numerous industrial companies. The industrial sales force assumes an important role in the selling of these complex service innovations. For firms a key challenge in this respect resides in ensuring the sales force’s motivation for the selling of such innovations and effectivel...

In the digital economy, many business-to-business companies expect their salespeople to promote e-commerce channels to customers as alternative ways to purchase. However, salespeople are often hesitant to comply with this approach, which despite its high practical relevance, has been rarely examined by academic research. Therefore, the authors deve...

This research note provides first insight into the question how salespeople should promote products that customers perceive as luxurious. The authors draw on the well-established finding of prior literature that purchasing luxurious products tends to make customers feel guilty. The authors theorize that informative salesperson communication (i.e.,...

The digital transformation of organizations is a pervasive force which fundamentally changes companies and, in fact, society as a whole. For many companies, the sales force is at the center of this transformation seeing the essential role of salespeople at the customer-company interface and the exceptional quantifiability of salespeople’s work outp...

Positive effects of incentives on salespeople’s motivation, effort, and performance are well-established in literature. This article takes a novel look at their influence on salespeople’s health. The results of four empirical studies, including more than 1,400 salespeople, suggest that an increasing variable compensation share (i.e., greater pay-fo...

On encountering a prospect whom they believe unlikely to make a purchase, some retail salespeople adopt a sales strategy of limiting engagement with the customer, relying on a “no conversion, no conversation” (NC ² ) sales strategy. Is this a good or bad sales strategy? Based on a multisource dataset combining salespeople and objective sales perfor...

Managerial and academic literature provide only limited guidance on how to drive the digital transformation of sales. This article presents a model for in-depth analysis of sales processes, goals for each process in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, and a structured set of digital responses. For managers, it provides actionable guidelines on h...

With the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, industrial suppliers are increasingly challenged to close their open sales opportunities and keep generating business. Against this backdrop, the authors of this study investigate which offerings industrial customers are most likely to purchase as the pandemic progresses. Drawing on positive decision...

Personal relationships between salespeople and customers are essential for the success of business-to-business relationships, and research has shown that a change of the salesperson can severely harm financial performance. However, such interpersonal relationship disruptions may also have positive effects by encouraging vitalizing reexplorations of...

The concept of adaptive selling has been firmly established as a key driver of salespeople’s selling performance. To measure adaptive selling, studies commonly use generic items that capture the extent to which salespeople adapt their behaviors to customers. Despite the predictive validity of these items, the personal selling and sales research com...

Although customers frequently negotiate the prices of both goods and services, academic research has mostly examined negotiations in goods contexts, neglecting the fact that negotiations for services may be different. This study examines the consequences of customers’ price negotiation behavior relating to services as compared to goods. Using five...

The concept of customer centricity is frequently debated by sales and marketing researchers and practitioners. However, to date no validated scale exists that measures to what extent customers perceive companies as customer centric. Against this backdrop, drawing on prior literature, qualitative interviews, and a customer survey (N = 246), the auth...

Purpose Prior research has argued that family firms are reluctant to consider external equity as a source of financing because they fear a loss of control, which would limit their socioemotional wealth. However, prior empirical research has neglected potential contingencies that determine whether family firms’ need for control affects their equity...

Recognizing the rapid advances in sales digitization and artificial intelligence technologies, we develop concepts, priorities, and questions to help guide future research and practice in the field of personal selling and sales management. Our analysis reveals that the influence of sales digitalization technologies, which include digitization and a...

In personal selling, the inspirational appeal (IA) is a widely promoted tactic that aims at stimulating customers' values and ideals, thereby evoking emotions and arousing their enthusiasm for a product. However, whether IAs in fact improve or undermine salespeople's success in sales talks remains controversial. Therefore, this study examines conse...

Salespeople assume a key role in defending firms’ price levels in price negotiations with customers. The degree to which salespeople defend prices should critically depend upon their leaders’ influence. However, the influence of leadership on salespeople’s price defense behavior is barely understood, conceptually or empirically. Therefore, building...

Service employees frequently must enforce rules upon their customers to mitigate dysfunctional customer behavior and ensure proper service delivery (e.g., enforce "fasten seatbelt" signs on flights). However, the consequences of enforcing service rules (ESR) are not well understood. To elucidate the effect of ESR, the authors present seven studies...

In face of the increasing attention on issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by the general public and policy makers, companies have put growing emphasis on ensuring CSR along their supply chains. Existent research has produced evidence that companies can increase their suppliers' CSR engagement by exerting explicit pre...

Obwohl Luxusmarken primär über persönlichen Verkauf vertrieben werden, wurden bislang keine Erfolgsfaktoren in diesem Verkaufskontext untersucht. Der vorliegende Beitrag adressiert diese Forschungslücke erstmalig. Die Autoren führten zwei Studien durch, um die Wirkung von in Forschung und Praxis etablierten Verkaufsstrategien (Informationsaustausch...

Extant research established that customers’ expectations play an ambivalent role in the satisfaction formation process: While higher expectations are more difficult to meet and thus cause dissatisfaction, they simultaneously increase satisfaction via customers’ perceived performance owing to a placebo effect. However, to date, knowledge is scarce o...

Prior research has firmly established that consumers draw benefits from a firm's engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially the feeling of a "warm glow." These benefits positively affect several desirable outcomes, such as willingness to pay and customer loyalty. The authors propose that consumers do not blindly perceive benefi...

This article is the first to empirically examine the effect of customer loyalty in retail price negotiations. Across three field studies and one negotiation experiment, the authors establish what they call the "loyalty-discount cycle": in price negotiations with salespeople, loyal customers receive deeper discounts that, in turn, increase customer...

Organizational downsizing to cut costs frequently creates new, “hidden costs” that neutralize potential increases in productivity. Customer dissatisfaction is such an overlooked downsizing outcome. Using longitudinal data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Compustat, and a consumer survey this study analyzes satisfaction outcomes...