Selling Activity and Sales Position Taxonomies for Industrial Salesforces

Abstract

The author develops a comprehensive inventory of selling activities and uses it to analyze the jobs of 1393 salespeople employed by 51 industrial selling organizations. He also develops a taxonomy of sales activities based on frequency of occurrence of 121 sales activities. In addition, a taxonomy of six industrial sales jobs is created from configurations of sales activity factors. Managerial implications of the findings are discussed and directions for further research are proposed.