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Marketing

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

2016

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Full-Text Articles in Business

Take No For An Answer? Unpacking Persistence And Examining Its Impact On Salesperson Performance, Nawar Naim Chaker Aug 2016

Take No For An Answer? Unpacking Persistence And Examining Its Impact On Salesperson Performance, Nawar Naim Chaker

Doctoral Dissertations

Common wisdom suggests that persistence is a critical determinant of sales performance and, consequently, salespeople are often advised “don’t take no for an answer.” While the importance of persistence to sales success is seemingly unquestioned (albeit unexamined in the literature), anecdotal evidence suggests that the incremental business generated through salesperson persistence may be tempered – if not overshadowed – by its accompanying costs (e.g., time spent pursuing hesitant prospects). The goal of this research is thus to explore the impact of persistence on salesperson performance. Grounded in social influence theory, this study views sales persistence as a combination of influence …


Examining The Nature And Consequences Of Interfunctional Bias In A Corporate Setting, William Adam Powell Aug 2016

Examining The Nature And Consequences Of Interfunctional Bias In A Corporate Setting, William Adam Powell

Doctoral Dissertations

Interfunctional bias is examined in this dissertation as a potential barrier to interfunctional cooperation. Interfunctional cooperation is desirable in modern corporate organizations as a contributor to effective service delivery, operations planning, and sales performance. Interfunctional stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are hypothesized to relate positively, and together provide the bias-based theoretical basis through which barriers to interfunctional cooperation can be more thoroughly understood. Based on the extant literature in marketing and psychology, competing models of interfunctional bias are developed and hypothesized. In the first of three studies a questionnaire-based survey of supply chain employees’ perceptions of salespeople permitted the examination of …