Organizational and individual learning in the sales force: an agenda for sales research

In today's marketplace, change is a given, and learning is a critical component to the success of change initiatives. In recent years, marketing scholars have proposed that learning is a key to creating a sustainable competitive advantage and enhancing business performance. This article addresses the issue of learning and attempts to establish learning as a legitimate variable for study as it relates to sales force management. To that end, the authors have endeavored to provide, through the positing of propositions, a research agenda for the examination of learning in a sales force context. The authors provide a review of the pertinent literature on individual and organizational learning. Included in the presentation is a discussion of change success measures that go beyond the traditional measure of sales force success-sales volume. In the article, propositions relating various organizational and individual variables to organizational and individual salesperson learning are presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.