Business Ethics Journal Article

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Toward a new perspective on salesperson success and motivation: a trifocal framework. By: Delpechitre, Duleep; Gupta, Aditya; Zadeh, Arash H.; Lim, Joon Ho; Taylor, Steven A. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Dec2020, Vol. 40 Issue 4, p267-288. 22p. 1 Diagram, 4 Charts. Abstract: Recent developments in sales theory and practice have shed light on the increasing complexity of the sales domain, which inspires a reassessment of understanding salespeople's success and underlying motivational needs. This research adopts a service ecosystem perspective to recognize the complexity faced by salespeople due to their relationships with multiple stakeholders/actors. The study draws on a qualitative research methodology, namely, focus groups, to explore research questions with sales professionals. Findings reveal that, when defining success, salespeople tend to consider three key stakeholders in the selling process: the customer, the firm, and the seller. Thus, the work of salespeople is framed through the lens of an advisor, an entrepreneur, and a personalizer, respectively, and posit that these lenses are linked to distinct motivational needs for identification, territorialization, efficiency, and customization, with each need associated with a set of key enablers. Collectively, these lenses, needs, and enablers comprise a trifocal perspective on salesperson success and motivation that parsimoniously captures the complexity of professional selling while allowing variations due to institutional and personal factors. The study concludes by discussing the theoretical and managerial contributions of this framework, along with outlining some avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] DOI: 10.1080/08853134.2020.1805748. (AN: 147135770)

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Toward a new perspective on salesperson success and motivation: a trifocal framework

Recent developments in sales theory and practice have shed light on the increasing complexity of the sales domain, which inspires a reassessment of understanding salespeople's success and underlying motivational needs. This research adopts a service ecosystem perspective to recognize the complexity faced by salespeople due to their relationships with multiple stakeholders/actors. The study draws on a qualitative research methodology, namely, focus groups, to explore research questions with sales professionals. Findings reveal that, when defining success, salespeople tend to consider three key stakeholders in the selling process: the customer, the firm, and the seller. Thus, the work of salespeople is framed through the lens of an advisor, an entrepreneur, and a personalizer, respectively, and posit that these lenses are linked to distinct motivational needs for identification, territorialization, efficiency, and customization, with each need associated with a set of key enablers. Collectively, these lenses, needs, and enablers comprise a trifocal perspective on salesperson success and motivation that parsimoniously captures the complexity of professional selling while allowing variations due to institutional and personal factors. The study concludes by discussing the theoretical and managerial contributions of this framework, along with outlining some avenues for future research.

Keywords: salesperson success; salesperson motivation; qualitative research; trifocal perspective; complexity; service ecosystem

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Introduction Crucial changes are underway in the practice of professional selling due to rapidly evolving technology, competition, and changes in sales relationships. These changes have elevated the complexity of selling jobs and forced firms to revisit the extant understanding of salespeople's success, motivation, and underlying needs to ensure consistently high performance (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Khusainova et al. [69]; Pluck et al. [109]; Seriki et al. [121]). Salespeople are expected to juggle multiple roles, skills, and knowledge domains while managing different types of customers, organizations, and external task environments (Seriki et al. [121]). This continuing transformation of professional selling further requires salespeople to build and manage relationships with various stakeholders (or actors), such as customers, supervisors, and colleagues from other functions or departments within their firms, throughout the selling process (Cuevas [30]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]). This increase in complexity has spurred a recent wave of academic work amid numerous calls for research urging for a more robust understanding of how this complexity impacts different aspects of the selling process (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Pluck et al. [109]; Schmitz and Ganesan [117]; Seriki et al. [121]).

Despite the essence of complexity, the link between salesperson success and salesperson motivation in the current complex sales domain has remained understudied concerning building more robust theory, providing actionable guidance to practitioners, and incorporating newer perspectives on selling (Asare, Yang, and Brashear [ 5]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Khusainova et al. [69]). Given the importance of focal factors, such as salesperson success, motivation, and performance, to sales scholars and sales practitioners (Anderson and Weitz [ 4]; Jaramillo and Marshall [60]; Williams and Attaway [150]), there is an emerging need to revisit the understanding of these topics to ensure continued levels of high performance among sales professionals. Recent arguments, however, favor moving toward a service ecosystem perspective that recognizes the complexity of sales, especially concerning salespeople's relationships with multiple stakeholders (Dixon and Tanner [37]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Plouffe et al. [108]). Nascent sales research has adopted the service ecosystem perspective (Hughes and Ogilvie [55]; Mullins, Menguc, and Panagopoulos [101]; Taylor et al. [135]). However, limited research has investigated salesperson success and motivation within the context of multiple stakeholders with whom salespeople have to manage relationships during their careers. In this vein, the emerging motivation literature underscores that "our field must understand how to maximize salesperson success forward into the new horizons ahead" and recommend investigating salesforce motivations in the prevailing complex scope (Khusainova et al. [69], 14). More importantly, as sales theory increasingly recognizes how selling and value creation emerge over time within the broader social systems, involving a broad set of stakeholders engaged in service-for-service exchange to co-create value, there is a greater need to study the context of these multiple important stakeholders (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]). Failure to do so results in a much less-nuanced view of salesperson success and motivation that could potentially limit the robustness of future scholarly work and the efficacy of salesforce management practices for an increasingly intergenerational salesforce (Cuevas [30]; Khusainova et al. [69]; Seriki et al. [121]).

The central aim of this research, therefore, is to address the theoretical gap in current sales literature by focusing on the following research questions:

RQ1: How do present-day salespeople define success within the context of their relationships with key stakeholders?

RQ2: How do these definitions of success impact the ways in which salespeople go about pursuing such success?

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Given the exploratory nature of these research questions, the study uses a qualitative research methodology to investigate perceptions of success and associated motivations among salespeople. Overall, nine focus groups were conducted with 33 respondents, comprising sales representatives and sales managers from a wide variety of firms and industries. The collective diversity in demographic and professional backgrounds, in conjunction with recommended best practices for conducting focus groups for academic research, helped generate a rich corpus of findings regarding the research questions. Iterative rounds of data collection and analysis resulted in the conceptualization, development, and refinement of a trifocal perspective on salesperson success and motivation that represents the central contribution of the research.

Briefly, the findings of the study show that salespeople tend to evaluate success and motivation from the perspective of three key stakeholders in the selling process: the customer, the firm, and the seller. These stakeholders represent, respectively, the clients and buyers with whom salespeople conduct business, members of the selling organization where the salespeople work, and the salespeople themselves. Consequently, results suggest framing the work of salespeople through the lens of an advisor, an entrepreneur, and a personalizer in relation to these three key stakeholders, respectively. Study findings also illustrate that salespeople have four distinct motivational needs associated with these three lenses that are linked to the salespeople's relationships with the respective stakeholders. Specifically, salespeople pursue a need for identification as advisors, a need for territorialization and a need for efficiency as entrepreneurs, and a need for customization as personalizers. Each need, moreover, is further linked to certain enablers (detailed later) that are instrumental in helping salespeople pursue that need. A trifocal perspective, thus, emerges from this analysis, comprising these three lenses that collectively provide a nuanced picture of salesperson success and motivation within the context of their key stakeholder relationships. Finally, the study presents the argument that this perspective is malleable (the relative composition of the three lenses within a salesperson is not fixed and can change) and variable (different salespeople have different 'lens mixes') as its composition is shaped by different institutional and personal factors.

The findings contribute to sales theory and practice in several ways by providing a stakeholder-oriented perspective on salesperson success and motivation in line with the emerging service ecosystem's theoretical perspective on selling and the increasing complexity within the domain of professional selling in practice. Previous research on salesperson motivation mainly uses expectancy theory and attribution theory (Badovick [ 7]; Oliver [102]). Most recent work adopted a self-determination theory (SDT) perspective (Deci and Ryan [33]) by looking at intrinsic and extrinsic motivation among salespeople (Cadwallader et al. [21]; Khusainova et al. [69]; Mallin et al. [87]; Mallin and Ragland [85]). In summary, the framework presented in this study aims to provide an integrative conceptual framework that extends and enriches current marketing discourse by providing a stakeholder-oriented perspective on salesperson success and motivation that acknowledges the growing real-world complexity of sales and the associated need to adopt a service ecosystem perspectives on professional selling. Specifically, this study adds to the existing stream of research by illustrating how salesperson motivation, in addition to being intrinsic or extrinsic, must be considered concerning each key stakeholder with whom salespeople interact throughout their work. Salespeople, in effect, can be intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to fulfill the four needs that are linked to the three lenses comprising the trifocal perspective. The three lenses help tie together different aspects of salespeople's work referenced in previous research regarding their need to take the initiative, the intra-organizational dimensions of their work environment, and a growing focus on the quality of life and well-being (Bande et al. [11]; Claro and Ramos [27]; Edmondson, Matthews, and Ambrose [43]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Lyngdoh, Liu, and Sridhar [83]; Plouffe [107]; Storbacka et al. [127]). For practitioners, recognizing this underlying complexity provides a much more nuanced avenue for salesforce management, especially when considering the respective enablers that are linked to each motivational needs. Applying the trifocal perspective to different members of the firm's

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salesforce can bring to light, for instance, the type of monetary incentives, non-monetary perks, supervisory practices, internal processes, and organizational structures that are likely to result in higher levels of salesperson motivation and consequent levels of achievement and success.

The remainder of this manuscript is structured as follows: First, a review of marketing literature on salesperson success and its drivers (especially in complex contexts) and salesperson motivation along with its antecedents and outcomes is presented. Next, a description of the methodology, followed by a detailed presentation of the findings and a description of the conceptual framework are provided. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications from the research and potential avenues for future research are presented.

Literature review

Salesperson success: an overview Although salesperson success is frequently referenced within sales literature in the context of individual performance and organizational outcomes (Anderson and Weitz [ 4]; Jaramillo and Marshall [60]; Williams and Attaway [150]), it has not been formally defined as a construct, at least not one with a definition that is commonly agreed upon. The literature on salespersons' failure defines failure as a salesperson's inability to meet minimum job standards or fulfill realistic performance expectations (Ingram, Schwepker, and Hutson [57]; Morris, LaForge, and Allen [100]). However, such an analogous definition has not been offered for salesperson success. This gap is not altogether surprising given that salesperson performance, and to a lesser extent, salesperson effectiveness has often been used as proxies for salesperson success (Leong, Busch, and John [78]; Sengupta, Krapfel, and Pusateri [120]; Walker, Churchill, and Ford [145]).

Defining salesperson success The Merriam-Webster Dictionary ([91]) defines success as the attainment of favorable outcomes, such as wealth, favor, or eminence. Given the context of sales, this study posits that salesperson success should be defined in terms of attaining certain favorable outcomes that represent a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic elements. While extrinsic elements of success would refer to objectively observable outcomes, such as performance, salary, promotion, and job title (Day and Allen [32]; Orpen [105]; Seibert, Kraimer, and Liden [119]), intrinsic elements of success would refer to individuals' subjective feelings and assessments of accomplishment and satisfaction with their careers (Judge et al. [65]; Seibert, Kraimer, and Liden [119]; Turban and Dougherty [137]).

Various fields of research, including organization psychology and career management, consistently suggest capturing such extrinsic and intrinsic elements to assess employee success (Day and Allen [32]; Seibert, Kraimer, and Liden [119]). While early sales literature assessed salesperson success by capturing extrinsic elements, such as individual job performance and monetary rewards (Comer and Drollinger [28]; Morris, LaForge, and Allen [100]; Walker, Churchill, and Ford [145]), more recent research has emphasized the importance of intrinsic measures, such as respect, freedom, work-family balance, and lifestyle (Does [38]). Such a holistic focus is welcome as it also helps address larger questions linked to the pursuit of life satisfaction, meaningful happiness, and well-being (Alba and Williams [ 3]; Does [38]; Gupta [49]; Schmitt, Brakus, and Zarantonello [116]; Sirgy [122]) while simultaneously adopting broader theoretical perspectives on selling that can incorporate stakeholder relationships in complex contexts (Berry [16]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]).

Drivers of salesperson success Previous work on salesperson success has documented salespeople's abilities, skills, content knowledge, and personal characteristics as the predominant drivers of salesperson success (Marshall, Goebel, and Moncrief

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[88]). Weilbaker ([147]) identified 14 selling abilities critical to a salesperson's successful relationships with buyers, ranging from adaptability, comprehension, and learning to creativity, perseverance, and likeability. Marshall, Goebel, and Moncrief ([88]) investigated sales managers' perceptions of factors that were important to professional salespeople's success by looking at six levels of skills. Listening, follow-up, communication, and proficiency in interacting with buyers were considered the most important; skills such as coordinating schedules, database management, and many more were considered the least important. Jaramillo and Marshall ([60]) looked at differences between the skills of top and bottom performers across five selling techniques: prospecting, approach, sales presentation, closing, and follow-up service. Another body of literature recognized knowledge-related factors, such as education, intellectual capability, knowledge structures, and knowledge brokering as drivers of salespeople's success (Lamont and Lundstrom [76]; Szymanski [131]; Verbeke and Masih [142]; Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan [129]). A final stream of related research investigated personal and physical characteristics of salespeople, such as ambidexterity, persistence, attractiveness, empathy, endurance, and ego strength as the determinants of their success (Chaker, Zablah, and Noble [24]; Lam, DeCarlo, and Sharma [75]; Lamont and Lundstrom [76]; Lockeman and Hallaq [81]; Wongkitrungrueng et al. [152]; Zemanek, McIntyre, and Zemanek [154]). Collectively, a common factor across this body of research is the frequent use of salesperson success as a concept without necessarily using an explicit definition. A similar feature is visible in nascent work investigating drivers of salesperson success in complex contexts, discussed next.

Drivers of salesperson success in complex sales contexts Rising complexity in the domain of professional selling necessitates revisiting the understanding of salesperson success and its drivers. Complexity within selling involves the degree to which sales tasks require salespeople to cultivate multiple skills and manage different knowledge domains, while simultaneously balancing various roles in their interactions with diverse customers, organizational structures, and external task environments (Cuevas [30]; Seriki et al. [121]).

Faced with such complexity, effectively managing relationships with various stakeholders becomes key to salesperson success, frequently requiring strategies such as improving relational competencies and developing relationship portfolios through establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges (Madhavaram and Hunt [84]). Talluri and Narasimhan ([133]) indicated that professional purchasing managers employ complex matrices to acquire the 'right' resources and develop the 'right' relationships to respond to buyers whose increasing demand requires more value from the product/service and seller relationship. Finally, although researchers emphasized the importance of balancing different role identities when working in a complex ecosystem (Pardo, Ivens, and Niersbach [106]; Steward et al. [125]), most extant work considers salesperson success only within the context of successful relationships with buyers/customers, involving adaptive and consultative selling (Hochstein et al. [52]; Kwak et al. [74]; Marshall, Goebel, and Moncrief [88]; Wilson [151]). What is needed, therefore, is a greater understanding of salesperson perceptions of success that can capture multiple stakeholders relationships within increasingly complex sales contexts (Khusainova et al. [69]; Taylor et al. [135]). In summary, given the limited research on salesperson success per se, especially within complex contexts, the research questions – focused on understanding sales professionals' definition and pursuit of success – provide a way forward in this regard. The overall conceptualization of success arising from the findings successfully melds intrinsic/objective and extrinsic/subjective components. Moreover, as success is anchored in distinct motivational needs among sales professionals. Next, a brief overview of salesperson motivation is provided.

Salesperson motivation: an overview

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Salesperson motivation has long been a critical focus for scholars and practitioners (Brown, Cron, and Slocum [20]; Doyle and Shapiro [39]; Jaramillo, Mulki, and Marshall [62]; Kohli, Shervani, and Challagalla [71]; Sujan, Sujan, and Bettman [130]). Salesperson motivation is a psychological state that instigates behavior and has been defined as "the amount of effort the salesman desires to expand on each of the activities or tasks associated with his job" (Walker, Churchill, and Ford [146], 162). It has been studied through the prism of several theoretical perspectives, such as Vroom's ([144]) expectancy theory and Weiner's ([148]) attribution theory. However, most work in the previous decade tended to adopt Deci and Ryan ([33]; see also Ryan and Deci [115]) SDT perspective on human motivation as intrinsic or extrinsic (see Table 1 for a review).

Table 1. A review of salesperson motivation.

ID Article MotivationKey findings

IntrinsicExtrinsic 1 Abratt and

Smythe (1989)

✓ Job satisfaction and financial compensation are salespeople's primary motivators.

2 Bande et al. (2016)

✓ The positive relationship between servant leadership and salespersons' proactive and adaptive behaviors is mediated by intrinsic motivation.

3 Bande et al. (2019)

✓ When intrinsic motivation is controlled for, work–family conflict negatively influences salespeople's proactive behaviors due to emotional exhaustion.

4 Becherer, Morgan, and Richard (1982)

✓ Job-related factors affect salesperson motivation and job satisfaction. In addition, intrinsic motivation is positively associated with salespeople's perception of their job characteristics and psychological states.

5 Chonko, Tanner, and Weeks (1992)

✓ A salary increase is one of the most critical motivators for salespeople.

6 Demirdjian (1984)

✓ ✓ The author developed a multidimensional approach for determining the appropriate motivational technique based on the triumvirate of salespeople's needs (economic needs, social needs, and self-actualization needs). The author argues that the motivation technique should be tailored to fit the particular needs of the individual, rather than having the manager adopt one generalized motivational device and apply it universally to all salespeople.

7 Dubinsky and Skinner (2002)

✓ The authors establish a proposition that a salesperson's intrinsic motivation is positively associated with discretionary effort.

8 Fu et al. (2017)

✓ ✓ Salespeople's affective brand commitment and brand effort are positively influenced by intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

9 Grant et al. (2001)

✓ Intrinsic motivation decreases role ambiguity and increases job satisfaction.

10 Hansen and Levin (2016)

✓ ✓ Apathetic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation can co-exist.

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ID Article MotivationKey findings

IntrinsicExtrinsic 11 Hohenberg

and Homburg (2016)

✓ ✓ Individualism strengthens the positive relationship between variable compensation for innovation sales results and financial innovation performance through innovation selling motivation. However, power distance and uncertainty avoidance weaken this relationship. Moreover, the positive relationship between supervisor appreciation for innovation sales results and financial innovation performance is strengthened by long-term orientation through innovation selling motivation.

12 Ingram, Lee, and Skinner (1989)

✓ ✓ Extrinsic motivation is a better predictor of performance compared to intrinsic motivation.

13 Jaramillo et al. (2007)

✓ Intrinsic motivation has a positive effect on adaptive selling.

14 Jaramillo and Mulki (2008)

✓ ✓ Supportive leadership has a positive impact on intrinsic motivation. Moreover, intrinsic motivation is positively associated with salesperson effort; extrinsic motivation is negatively associated with effort.

15 Karatepe and Tekinkus (2006)

✓ Intrinsic motivation has a significant negative effect on salespeople's emotional exhaustion; however, intrinsic motivation positively influences job performance, job satisfaction, and affective commitment to the organization.

16 Keaveney and Nelson (1993)

✓ An intrinsic motivational orientation reduces role conflict and role ambiguity, and in turn, enhances job satisfaction.

17 Keck, Leigh, and Lollar (1995)

✓ ✓ Motivation to earn money, personal enjoyment of selling, motivation to obtain recognition from peers, and willingness to work hard are the key agency success antecedents.

18 Levin, Hansen, and Laverie (2012)

✓ ✓ The intention to use sales- and marketing-related technology is positively affected by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

19 Low et al. (2001)

✓ Intrinsic motivation reduces burnout, role conflict, and role ambiguity, and increases job satisfaction.

20 Mallin and Pullins (2009)

✓ A salesperson's customer orientation positively affects intrinsic motivation meditated by feelings of fulfillment and enjoyment of being instrumental to the customer.

21 Menguc and Tansu Barker (2003)

✓ ✓ Salespeople can make up for the lack of intrinsic rewards if they have strong extrinsic rewards.

22 Miao and Evans (2007)

✓ ✓ Cognitive and affective orientations of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation have a distinct effect on role conflict, role ambiguity, and behavioral and outcome performance.

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ID Article MotivationKey findings

IntrinsicExtrinsic 23 Miao and

Evans (2012)

✓ The combination of capability and outcome-based control systems increases intrinsic motivation and salesperson knowledge. The combination of outcome and activity-based control systems reduces intrinsic motivation but increases role clarity. The negative effect of role ambiguity on performance is weakened by intrinsic motivation.

24 Miao, Evans, and Zou (2007)

✓ The cognitive dimension of intrinsic motivation and the affective dimension of intrinsic motivations are affected by activity control and capability control, respectively.

25 Miao, Lund, and Evans (2009)

✓ ✓ A salesperson's career stage plays a role in cognitive orientations of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

26 Oliver (1974)

✓ ✓ Extrinsic motivation is a good predictor of performance, but intrinsic motivation is not.

27 Oliver and Anderson (1994)

✓ ✓ Outcome-based control is associated with extrinsic motivation; however, behavior- based control is linked to intrinsic motivation.

28 Pullins (2001)

✓ ✓ Incentive payments and intrinsic rewards increase salespeople's motivation.

29 Pullins et al. (2000)

✓ ✓ Salespeople with high intrinsic motivation personalities (autonomy orientation) are more likely to initiate the use of cooperative negotiation tactics, compared to those with high extrinsic motivation (control orientation).

30 Riaz, Jamal, and Latif (2019)

✓ The negative relationship between work–family conflict and perceived job performance is weakened by intrinsic motivation.

31 Román and Iacobucci (2010)

✓ The relationship between a salesperson's perception of the firm's customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior is mediated by intrinsic motivation.

32 Segalla et al. (2006)

✓ Sales managers use incentive payments to spur salesperson motivation.

33 Sujan (1986)

✓ ✓ Extrinsic motivation leads salespeople to attribute their failures to a lack of effort, and thus, it pushes them to work harder. Intrinsic motivation leads salespeople to attribute failures to poor strategies, pushing them to work smarter.

34 Tanner, Tanner, and Wakefield (2015)

✓ ✓ The motivation for recognition has a positive impact on job satisfaction; however, motivation for compensation is not associated with job satisfaction.

35 Tyagi (1982)

✓ ✓ The organizational climate variables (job challenge and variety, job importance, task conflict, role overload, leadership consideration, organizational identification, and management concern and awareness) impact intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation differently.

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ID Article MotivationKey findings

IntrinsicExtrinsic 36 Tyagi

(1985a) ✓ ✓ Role conflict has the strongest negative impact on intrinsic motivation and extrinsic

motivation. The effect of role overload on intrinsic motivation is stronger than the effect on extrinsic motivation. Role ambiguity does not affect both types of work motivation significantly.

37 Tyagi (1985b)

✓ ✓ Key job dimensions, such as skill and variety, autonomy, importance, task identity, feedback, and agent's feedback, significantly influence salesperson intrinsic motivation; however, leadership characteristics, such as trust and support, goal emphasis and work facilitation, interaction facilitation, psychological influence, and hierarchical influence, have a significant influence on salesperson extrinsic motivation.

38 Verbeke, Belschak, and Bagozzi (2004)

✓ Performance-related motivations are promoted by pride.

39 Walker, Churchill, and Ford (1977)

✓ ✓ The authors propose a framework that shows intrinsic and extrinsic rewards influence motivation to accomplish better job performance.

40 Yidong and Xinxin (2013)

✓ The association between the perceptions of ethical leadership and salespeople's innovative work behavior is mediated by intrinsic motivation.

As Table 1 illustrates, sales researchers have frequently examined intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivation among salespeople when trying to understand the link between motivation and performance, along with the various institutional and personal factors that can impact that link. Intrinsic motivation (IM) is usually defined as the inclination or drive to perform an activity that arises from enjoyment of the activity itself, without requiring any reinforcement or reward. In contrast, extrinsic motivation (EM) is usually defined as the inclination or drive to perform an activity to receive separable outcomes that are distinct from the activity itself (Deci and Ryan [34]; Ryan and Deci [115]). Researchers have invoked the IM/EM dichotomy multiple times by examining the antecedents and consequences of salesperson motivation.

Antecedents of salesperson motivation Determinants of salesperson motivation for success have been studied from organizational and individual perspectives.

Organizational factors Overall, researchers have established that firm-level factors, such as organizational climate, job dimensions, leadership characteristics, and control systems, can impact IM and EM considerably (Becherer, Morgan, and Richard [14]; Jaramillo and Mulki [61]; Miao and Evans [94]; Tyagi [138], [139], [140]). In several cases, the nature of the impact of organizational factors differs for salespeople's IM and EM. For instance, job dimensions such as skill and variety influence IM; however, leadership characteristics such as trust and support influence EM (Tyagi [140]). Similarly, behavior-based control systems impact salespeople's IM, but outcome-based control systems influence salespeople's EM (Oliver and Anderson [103]). Researchers recently took an even more fine-grained approach and found, for instance, that a capability and outcome-based control system can improve IM, while an outcome and activity-based control system can reduce IM. Finally, researchers have

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investigated cognitive and affective dimensions of IM and EM. Authors found that activity controls increase recognition-seeking (the affective aspect of EM) and challenge-seeking (the cognitive aspect of IM) among salespeople, and capability controls increase compensation-seeking (the cognitive aspect of EM) and task enjoyment (the affective aspect of IM; Miao, Evans, and Zou [96]).

Individual factors In terms of person-level factors, researchers have found several aspects that impact either IM and EM or the link between them and salesperson performance. Miao, Lund, and Evans ([95]) found cognitive aspects of IM and EM change throughout salespeople's career stages. Other scholars established links between IM and emotions such as pride and individual differences such as levels of customer orientation (Mallin and Pullins [86]; Verbeke, Belschak, and Bagozzi [143]). More recently, researchers showed how controlling IM results in a negative relationship between work-family conflict and salespeople's proactive behaviors, and how IM can weaken the negative association between work–family conflict and perceived job performance (Bande et al. [11]; Riaz, Jamal, and Latif [112]). Finally, Hohenberg and Homburg ([54]) emphasized the need to examine cross-cultural factors when considering such individual differences in motivational levels.

Outcomes of salesperson motivation Researchers examining the relationship between salesperson success and IM and EM have found mixed results. Early sales research results indicated that salespeople's EM is a better predictor of performance than IM (Ingram, Lee, and Skinner [58]; Oliver [102]). However, researchers have recently argued that IM and EM are linked to salesperson performance with IM emerging as a stronger predictor (Miao and Evans [93]). Jaramillo and Mulki ([61]) findings partially corroborate this as they found that IM positively impacts salesperson effort, and EM negatively impacts such effort. The picture regarding certain outcomes, however, is consistent, as there is broad support for how IM can increase job satisfaction, often by reducing role conflict, role ambiguity, and role burnout (Becherer, Morgan, and Richard [14]; Grant et al. [47]; Keaveney and Nelson [67]; Low et al. [82]). When considering IM and EM in more nuanced detail, researchers found that challenge- seeking (the cognitive aspect of IM) and compensation-seeking (the cognitive aspect of EM) reduce role conflict. Task enjoyment (the affective aspect of IM) increases role ambiguity, and recognition-seeking (the affective aspect of EM) aggravates role conflict (Miao and Evans [93]; Miao, Evans, and Zou [96]).

To continue such advances in the understanding of salesperson success and motivation, however, a new framework for salesperson success and motivation is needed that not only adopts a broader perspective on different forms of motivation that may exist alongside the IM-EM continuum but that is also better able to accommodate the increasingly complex contexts within which salespeople pursue success based on their relationships with key stakeholders. The approach for addressing this theoretical gap and answering the research questions is to take a service ecosystem view of sales instead of a traditional dyadic view and explore, via a qualitative methodology, how salespeople from varied personal and professional backgrounds define and pursue success within the modern marketplace.

Method As the research questions were exploratory, the study used a qualitative research methodology. Nine focus groups were conducted that included 33 sales professionals who were recruited from various industries. The respondents collectively represented a diverse mix in terms of age, gender, professional roles, and industry, thus providing a broad range of perspectives on the research questions.

Qualitative research approaches can be beneficial within sales research when existing theoretical approaches may be inadequate in studying complex topics (see Johnson [64]). There is a growing need within the

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discipline for theoretical insights into salesperson success and motivation that adopt a service ecosystem perspective on sales by recognizing multiple stakeholders in favor of relying on the traditional dyadic perspective involving only buyers and sellers (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]). Consequently, a qualitative approach is well-suited for this research, as it allows for a more in-depth look at the salesperson's success and motivation in more complex contexts comprising multiple stakeholders.

In terms of the choice of research methodology, focus groups offer the unique advantage of letting respondents articulate their own perspectives while simultaneously allowing for a discussion when respondents' personal views converge or diverge with those of others in the group. Furthermore, there is sufficient precedence within the discipline as focus groups have been frequently used by marketing scholars and practitioners alike (Askegaard and Linnet [ 6]; Calder [22]; Stewart, Shamdasani, and Rook [126]; Tadajewski [132]). As this study illustrates, such groups allowed for rich insights to emerge regarding the research questions.

Data collection As the aim was to understand a range of perspectives on salesperson success and motivation, salespeople and sales managers were recruited. A purposive sampling approach was followed to ensure that they collectively represented a diverse mix of demographic and professional backgrounds. Respondents were selected through professional networks (via the sales program, the college of business, and the university) within the central Midwestern region. Sales professionals were sent a customized email inviting them to participate in the focus groups with a follow-up email sent a week after the initial email. No incentives were offered for participating in the focus groups, and all invited respondents were free to accept or decline the offer to participate. All those who chose to participate provided informed consent before data collection.

Table 2 contains the details of the final sample of respondents in the focus group sessions. As is the norm for qualitative research, pseudonyms were used for respondents and the names of their firms withheld (but their industries provided) for privacy reasons. As can be seen from the table, the final sample was sufficiently diverse, comprising men and women drawn from 28 different firms across more than 20 different industries and collectively representing a broad spectrum of age and length of professional experience. Including sales professionals from across career stages (i.e., from the executive level to the senior manager level) also helped avoid myopic top-down or bottom-up perspectives during the focus group sessions. Taken together, the collective heterogeneity in personal and professional backgrounds helped obviate potential concerns regarding confounds during data collection.

Table 2. Focus group respondent details.

Focus group

Name Role Industry GenderAgeSales experience (in years)

FG 1 Ethan Sales Operations Manager Logistics M 61 34 Nick Senior Account

Manager Logistics M 32 8

Eliot Regional Business Manager

Flooring systems M 61 35

Zeke District Manager B2B industrial and construction supplies

M 44 16

Nolan Executive Vice President

Printing and mailing solutions M 51 17

FG 2 Simon Senior Sales Executive Payroll and HR services

M 37 12

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Focus group

Name Role Industry GenderAgeSales experience (in years)

Mark Sales Manager Steel industry M 53 31 Natalie Sales Account

Specialist E-commence merchant F 27 5

Ursula Account Executive Banking F 23 3 FG 3 Ryan Enterprise Client Telecommunication M 25 4 Charles Customer Service

Specialist Technology M 33 5

FG 4 Edward Financial Advisor Financial planning and risk

M 50 3

Trevor Insurance Agent Insurance M 47 19 Tammy Field Sales Pharmaceutical and medical F 24 2 Megan Sales Consultant Dental care: medical sales F 25 4 FG 5 Harry Regional VP Sales HR and recruitment M 48 23 Kimmy Senior Business

Manager Rental and fleet management F 46 16

Angela Executive Vice President

Advertising and promotions F 51 30

Michael Account Manager Industrial forklift trucks M 34 10 FG 6 Callum Sales Executive Technology M 25 4 Nate Business Support Banking M 25 3 Edgar Field Sales Financial planning and risk M 27 4 Kane Agent Insurance M 55 32 FG 7 Tiffany Director of sales Hotel industry F 34 12 Nathan Partner Custom clothing M 42 18 Elizabeth Business

Development Banking F 40 20

Jake Sales Media and advertising M 39 7 Zara Account Executive Food and beverage F 30 2 FG 8 Kent Sales Manager Manufacturing M 37 13 Emmott VP Business

Development Staffing and HR management M 56 32

Kevin Global Client Executive

Enterprise technology M 42 11

FG 9 Quentin CEO Consulting and sales training

M 61 42

Norah Regional Manager Enterprise fleet management F 42 18 Data collection proceeded over eight months, during which nine focus groups were conducted. Seven were conducted in a face-to-face setting on a university campus in a dedicated research facility; two were conducted remotely via Zoom. A significant effort was taken to balance the appropriate group size with respondent availability. In line with recommendations (Krueger and Casey [72]; Morgan [98]; Onwuegbuzie et al. [104]), most focus groups consisted of four to five respondents from different firms. Three focus groups had fewer than four respondents due to last-minute cancelations by other respondents who had initially agreed to participate.

Following Catterall and Maclaran ([23]) recommendations for conducting marketing-related focus groups, close attention was paid to session duration and group composition. Catterall and Maclaran ([23]) recommend that

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focus groups should (i) last for an hour and a half, (ii) consist of strangers rather than acquaintances, and (iii) have participants with similar levels of knowledge and experience regarding the subject matter. Therefore, the focus groups (i) lasted between 75 and 140 minutes with an average length of approximately 104 minutes, (ii) consisted of participants who did not personally know each other as they usually came from different firms, and (iii) had participants who were sufficiently familiar with the sales domain (even the most junior respondents had 2 years of sales experience).

Two authors moderated each focus group, and each session was video recorded for transcription later. As outlined by Onwuegbuzie et al. ([104]), the moderators facilitated discussion, encouraged participation from all respondents, presented discussion questions and prompts, and engaged in thought exercises. Throughout the data collection phase, each author moderated at least two focus groups, which helped ensure that all authors became sufficiently familiar with the scope of the discussions and the kind of data generated. Based on findings from previous literature and preliminary discussions with sales professionals, a semi-structured focus group guide was developed (see the Supporting Information Web Appendix) to explore the lived experiences of sales professionals regarding questions of success and motivation. The guide consisted of broader questions aimed at eliciting responses based on participants' perceptions of success in the context of their relationships with key stakeholders. Additional probes were included to encourage respondents to elaborate on their statements by sharing examples (positive and negative) from their own experiences.

Data analysis Multiple sources of data were used during the data analysis phase, including transcripts from focus group recordings and notes taken by authors during focus group sessions or based on their viewing of session recordings. However, as transcript-based analysis has been recognized as "the most rigorous...mode of analyzing [focus group] data" (Onwuegbuzie et al. [104], 4), most of the analysis was based on the transcribed text. Overall, the nine focus group sessions resulted in about 16 hours of recordings and generated 192 transcript pages that formed the central corpus for the data analyses.

Data coding and analysis were conducted using the NVivo 12 qualitative software package due to its advantages of fine-grained coding and node structuring. Transcripts were first uploaded to the software package and then coded in successive stages (Creswell [29]; Johnson [64]; Strauss and Corbin [128]), beginning with open coding (assigning relevant quotes to higher-level categories), then axial coding (organizing open codes into initial sets of categories reflecting the beginnings of the framework), and finally, selective coding (conceptualizing the trifocal perspective on salesperson success with its three lenses and four motivational needs). As the overall analytical process was iterative, all the authors met multiple times to discuss their interpretations of emerging findings, actively participating in all stages of developing the framework from initial conceptualization to final refinement. Therefore, the conceptual framework (detailed in the Findings section) represents a collective analytical effort.

This analytical approach is in line with the constant comparative method (Leech and Onwuegbuzie [77]; Spiggle [124]) in which data is chunked into smaller units and given descriptive codes that are then grouped into broader categories that, in turn, are aggregated into representative themes that comprise the proposed framework. Ideas emerging from the initial rounds of data collection and analysis were also tested in later rounds to assess conceptual robustness and practical accuracy. In line with Charmaz's ([25]) recommendations, this recursive movement between data collection and data analysis continued until theoretical saturation was reached, and no new themes emerged from additional data collection.

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There are different perspectives on how many focus groups are considered sufficient for analytical purposes. Several scholars advocate between three and six focus groups for a given research project as theoretical saturation is often reached within that range (Guest, Namey, and McKenna [48]; Krueger and Casey [72]; Morgan [97], [98]). Consequently, nine focus groups safely exceed the suggested number for the research purpose. As a final theoretical saturation check, however, member checks were conducted by sharing the conceptual framework with five respondents from two different focus groups to evaluate whether the interpretation aligned with the participants' experiences (see Creswell [29]; Curtin and Fossey [31]; Doyle [40]; Johnson [64]). Minor revisions were made based on the feedback, but there was broad agreement across respondents that the proposed framework captured the complexity frequently inherent within modern-day salesforce management regarding salesperson success and motivation. In the next section, the findings that emerged from the analysis, and that helped in the development of a trifocal perspective on salesperson success motivation, are presented.

Findings As is the case with inductive research approaches, the elements of the conceptual core of the framework emerged gradually over the course of the research. When sales professionals were asked to articulate what success looked like for them, respondents drew on their interactions with clients in the marketplace, their personal experiences with supervisors and colleagues at their workplaces, the organizational structures and cultures, and even their interactions with sales professionals from other firms in their professional networks. It was observed that respondents chose to define success in various ways, ranging from monetary returns (such as commissions and sales incentives) and non-monetary perks (such as coffee machines and relaxed dress codes) to professional milestones (such as promotions and annual awards) and personal well-being (such as maternity leave and work–life balance). The breadth and depth of responses, therefore, added to the confidence in the applicability of the findings to several different sales contexts.

As iterative rounds of data collection and analysis were conducted, it was evident that participants' responses could primarily be categorized according to three key stakeholders/actors within the broader selling process and the service ecosystem (see Figure 1). These were the customer (representing the buyers or clients with whom salespeople conduct business), the firm (representing the selling organization that employs the salespeople), and the seller (representing the salespeople themselves). There are many more stakeholders whose actions can impact salesperson success (e.g., government institutions and regulatory authorities), but the findings are presented within the context of salespeople's relationships with these three stakeholders. They were the ones to whom salespeople repeatedly referred during the discussions (also referenced in the notes included in the Supporting Information Web Appendix about how the focus group discussion guide evolved). In that regard, respondent narratives showed that three distinct lenses emerged that collectively encapsulate the capacities in which salespeople act with these stakeholders. Thus, this study posits that salesperson success is better understood through a trifocal perspective consisting of an advisor lens, an entrepreneur lens, and a personalizer lens when considering salespeople's relationships with their customers, their firms, and themselves, respectively. As the study illustrates, salesperson success is closely linked to the extent to which salespeople can fulfill four distinct motivational needs – identification, territorialization, efficiency, and customization – linked to these three lenses.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. The trifocal perspective: a conceptual framework of salesperson success and motivational needs.

Concurrent with these findings, the study proposes two related ideas based on research observations: (a) These lenses should not be used in isolation as they co-exist within each salesperson, and (b) the precise

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composition of this trifocal perspective is fluid and malleable, subject to the interplay between various personal and professional factors. Each salesperson, therefore, represents a motivational mix of the three lenses, and salespeople across the selling organization are likely to differ in the proportion of each lens they embody. The framework proposed represents the first attempt to articulate a stakeholder-oriented view of salespeople's motivational needs and the associated factors that impact salesperson success in sales research. Consequently, the framework provides a detailed yet parsimonious account of the motivational complexity that comes to the fore when, as a discipline, sales research moves beyond the traditional sales perspective to the service ecosystem view of sales (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]). A detailed description of the findings for each lens is presented next.

The customer: the advisor lens and the need for identification The first lens that emerged from respondent narratives is linked to the stakeholder who is usually considered the most integral for salesperson success, the customer(s) with whom salespeople conduct business. Respondents referred to them as 'clients', buyers', or 'customers' depending on their respective professional contexts, but the term 'customer' is used for simplicity when referring to them. Therefore, the first stakeholder is the customer. It was evident that salesperson success is often framed through the lens of an advisor, i.e., the extent to which salespeople act as trusted consultants to their customers who, in turn, actively solicit suggestions and advice from them regarding their business needs. Callum [FG 6] remarked:

If I have a customer who has got a problem or an issue or a product [that] they need to learn more about, and they call us proactively, I'm super happy! Because that means, at some point in our relationship, they have learned to trust us already, and they feel like we have enough credibility. They're saying, "Hey, can you tell us more about it? I think it's something I may be interested in, but I just don't know enough about it." That, for us, is a big, big deal!

Echoing this sentiment, Nolan [FG 1] spoke of how becoming an advisor was something that took sustained time and effort:

It takes a long time to build those relationships. You can't walk in there with an idea today and think you're going to be the consultative sales rep because you have to build that relationship over time. Show that you're here more than just to sell them something, that you're here to help them with their business. That's the ideal.

In the same vein, Tammy [FG 4] spoke of how she viewed her role as centered on 'offering advice, building trust, and managing and developing relationships'. In line with this lens, the critical motivational theme that emerged was a need for identification among salespeople regarding their customers. As the quotes above illustrate, salespeople frequently talked about the importance of getting to know their customers and their businesses so profoundly that they could identify with their customers' issues and, as a result, recommend the best courses of action. Nick [FG 1] referred to it as reaching a stage when his customers would start viewing him "as a partner that's not necessarily on the payroll, but [is] a partner in business."

As respondents spoke about pursuing such identification, they discussed two additional enablers: expertise and empathy. Briefly, expertise was professional as it represented salespeople's command over sales-related skills and capabilities; empathy was personal as it represented salespeople's feelings of kinship with their customers.

The importance of expertise in achieving identification was illustrated in a comment from Ethan [FG 1]:

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You're not just helping them with your product or your solution; you actually will be bringing some commercial teaching or insights about what they should be doing with their business. And if [the client] is getting this free consultation with somebody who's dealing with probably 30 different businesses like theirs, why would you want to give that up?

Trevor [FG 4] concurred and emphasized the importance of expertise by framing it almost as a personal responsibility, something that he felt duty-bound to provide to his customers:

In my line of business, I don't want to just take orders! I want to have clients, and I want to help guide and coach and mentor them to do what's in their best interest! Versus, you know, just reading out everything and just clicking a button saying I want X, Y, or Z. I want to help. I want to have a relationship with them. I want their trust that I can advise them.

Mark [FG 2], in contrast, noted what could happen in the absence of expertise when he talked about a hypothetical situation of how "if I don't do a good job with a referral [that] I get from a banker, and then that [referral] client calls the banker back up, well, guess who's not getting any more referrals?"

The importance of empathy was also relayed by respondents as an integral enabler that helped them better identify with their customers. Respondents often spoke about having to adopt their customers' perspective in dealings with their own firm, best exemplified by Quentin [FG 9], who said:

I think when you're doing this consultative type selling, then the deeper the relationship that I had with the client, the more like the client I became. And when I would speak to my firm, I almost spoke as the client! Especially when I would make [sic] conflict resolution, I was accused sometimes by my firm of siding with the customer too much. Because I try to be as objective as possible, they viewed me almost too close to my client. Which is okay, though, because I'm an advocate for my client.

Kane [FG 6] agreed, saying that "the thing that I'm trying to build with a lot of my customers is I want them to know that I know them [well]. They're more than a customer." In conjunction with the importance of fostering strong relationships, Nolan [FG 1] showed how empathy was often crucial in such relationships when customers perceived a firm as somewhat distant, and the salespeople had to speak up on the firm's behalf:

If the company is intimate enough with their customers, they might not need to do that, but if they're not; if they're a large company and don't get involved in anything their customers are doing, then they have to rely on their salespeople as being the mouthpiece to their customers.

To summarize, when salespeople think of their work with the customer as the focal stakeholder, then the lens they adopt to evaluate their success is that of an advisor who can utilize a combination of professional expertise and personal empathy to fulfill a need for identification with customers. Doing so, as the quotes illustrate, results in increased trust between salespeople and their customers, thus strengthening customer relationships and improving the likelihood of referrals, positive word-of-mouth, and repurchases. The next set of findings involve the key internal stakeholders within the selling organization that employs the salespeople.

The firm: the entrepreneur lens and the needs for territorialization and efficiency The second lens that emerged from the focus groups was linked to stakeholders within the selling organization whose actions had a direct bearing on salesperson success. These stakeholders can be grouped into two main categories: supervisors and/or senior managers (or the leadership team, according to some respondents) within the organization who oversaw salespeople's work and colleagues from other functions and/or

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departments on whom salespeople depended for the smooth functioning of their day-to-day work. For parsimony, the two groups were combined under the term firm that collectively represents the important actors within the selling organization from the salespeople's point of view.

When focusing on the firm as a key stakeholder, it was found that salesperson success was often framed through the lens of an entrepreneur, i.e., the extent to which salespeople act as responsible business owners focused on maintaining and growing their business footprint under the watchful eye of their supervisors, and with strong support from other departments within the firm. Mark [FG 2], who has experience in account representation, reflected on the unique nature of a salesperson's role:

The salesperson role is one of the few roles where your effort, your energy, and obviously your results can truly impact your financial outcome, right? So, if I approach the sales role as a business owner, how would I go about my day? Versus how might I go about my day if I'm sitting in an office doing an administrative function 8- to-5? Well, I'm going to treat my customers a certain way; the people I interact with a certain way, and referral sources a certain way; I'm going to treat my internal partners a certain way. You're even going to treat your account [representatives] a certain way because you know there is some level of downstream impact as it pertains to you!

Tiffany [FG 7] corroborated this framing and commented on the attraction that it often held for people looking to get into the sales profession on completing their education:

In my industry, there's a very real entrepreneur aspect to [the work of the sales function] and [students] want that, and that's what attracts them to the job. The fact that they have this control coming straight out of school in that environment.

Trevor [FG 4] agreed. He stated that he loved being treated like an entrepreneur as it "gives me the ability to dictate where I see myself and how quickly I want to grow."

In line with this lens, the first key motivational theme that emerged was a need for territorialization among salespeople. Salespeople placed a high degree of importance on being able to define the domain and scope of their 'small businesses', and then work toward managing and growing those businesses within the overall boundaries set by their supervisors or instituted by senior management. Kevin [FG 8] recounted the beginning of his sales career when he was handed a 'call list' of potential customers:

You eat what you kill basically, right? So, I started on the phones...pounding cold calling! I had a list, and the quota was tied to whatever list they gave me. So, at that point, it became, kind of, my small business to go get and manage.

As respondents talked about such territorialization within their respective work contexts, they repeatedly mentioned two enablers: ownership and autonomy. Ownership referred to a sense of personal investment in the scope of their work, and autonomy referred to the freedom they had to experiment by trying new ideas and taking calculated risks.

Respondents frequently indicated the importance of ownership when they talked about gaining a greater sense of personal stake in their work following a promotion. Norah [FG 9], who was promoted to branch manager at a car rental franchise, mentioned how she had to start being responsible for a lot more than just cars:

I'm the one dictating the performance, you know. The relationships with my accounts, making sure I have enough cars, making sure that cars are clean. I was shoveling the walkways even when I didn't have people

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coming. I was vacuuming before and after closing, just to make sure that everything was ready. That was my brand, that was my location! You begin to understand what's important in business and how to look at business in a different way.

Emmott [FG 8] similarly stated that he "didn't care about certain things because it didn't come out of your pocket" earlier in his career, but he had become much more careful about allocating resources as a senior partner within his firm:

Now, as an owner, I think, "Do I really need to order a whole set of new monitors?" It's like if you run a company where you have your own little sales unit. You can't go out and sell something your company doesn't offer, but you take ownership of it; you take ownership of the profitability, of the expenses, and everything within that.

Along with this sense of ownership, the other enabler in salespeople's pursuit of territorialization was the degree to which they enjoyed autonomy within their work. Simon [FG 2] spoke about the benefits of being able to conduct his business the way he wanted:

So, for instance, if I have an opportunity to make any size sale? It doesn't matter if it's ten dollars or a hundred million. If I can take that sale from beginning to end and do it with no oversight...it gives you a little bigger piece of the pie mentally.

In many cases, such autonomy was referred to in the context of the practices and policies of salespeople's supervisors. Quentin [FG 9] credited one of his previous managers with allowing him the freedom to experiment while promising to support him in case of setbacks:

When I first started in computer sales, I had a manager who was great! How many times must he have said, "Don't worry about that. Let's try it, don't worry about it." And that was great for me, too! He allowed me to take risks, and knowing that he believed in you was important. Even to the point where you knew that if we did something that didn't work, he would cover me, or it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Norah [FG 9] agreed, recalling how "as a management trainee, I really enjoyed being able to negotiate an upgrade with a customer without asking or without double-checking with my supervisor." In other cases, however, it was part of an overall organizational culture that was relatively more liberal and flexible, as Kevin's [FG 8] experience of working as a sales manager in a startup:

I mean, it almost depends on the organizational setup. Like at that startup, right? We pretty much had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do or whatever we thought was the most efficient, successful path.

Analogous to the need for territorialization, the second motivational theme that emerged was a need for efficiency that reflected the importance salespeople placed on being able to satisfy various day-to-day operational and business-related needs with the as little inconvenience as possible. Respondents mentioned two key enablers: structures and processes. Sales professionals repeatedly emphasized the importance of having the right organizational and/or department structures, coupled with smoothly functioning business processes in place to support salespeople. Eliot [FG 1] described how a new sale often involves many different steps and how the lack of cooperation from other departments could feel stifling:

When I go out on the street, and I win a new account, I have to go back and create an account number which involves accounting people. I have to create an operational plan and set a pick-up time that involves our operational people. I don't want that operational counterpart to say, "No, we can't pick him up at 4:30," right? I

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just got some business! I want them to say, "Wow, you've won a new customer, good job! Yes, we'll pick them up at 4:30!"

Nolan [FG 1] expressed a similar sentiment:

If I made a commitment for the company [the client] to do certain things that I, you know, obviously couldn't do myself: logistical things, ASAP kind of stuff. Those are the times when you want them [the people in other departments] to say, "He made that commitment, we better fulfill that commitment ASAP!"

Kevin [FG 8] emphasized how having stable structures and internal processes within the selling organization can be so attractive that salespeople may even switch jobs in pursuit of such efficiency:

When I worked at [his firm] the first time, I had pre-sales people, post-sales people, I had customer service, I had finance, I had to invoice. I had anything that I ever would want to get my job done. And that's one of the reasons I came back to [his firm] from my old job. As it [his firm] was a larger company that had all the plumbing and all those processes already built out. Just makes my job a lot easier!

To summarize, when salespeople think of their work with the firm as a key stakeholder, they evaluate their success through the lens of an entrepreneur who (i) combines a sense of ownership and autonomy (collectively conferred on them through supervisors' management practices or the overall organizational culture) to fulfill a need for territorialization regarding their business footprint and (ii) seeks to fulfill a need for efficiency (via available organizational structures and business processes) in the work that colleagues in other departments perform to support the sales function. Doing so, as the quotes illustrate, results in increased knowledge and capabilities among salespeople, thus improving the likelihood of their future growth within the firm while simultaneously ensuring the continued success of their 'small businesses'. Next, the final set of findings involving the stakeholders who comprise the linchpin of every selling organization, the salespeople, is presented.

The seller: the personalizer lens and the need for customization The third and final lens that emerged during the study was linked to a within-subject perspective, i.e., the stakeholders whose success is investigated in the first place, the salespeople. The previous two lenses incorporated salesperson success, and a detailed description of why the third lens (which is referred to by the term seller) is different, and more importantly, how it is useful, is presented.

This perspective (seller) is not only necessary but also crucial. Salesforces are becoming more intergenerational, as larger numbers of younger people enter the sales domain to work with members who are often older and more experienced. Furthermore, looking at a given salesperson in this holistic fashion recognizes that sellers' ecosystems include not only stakeholders who are linked to their work domains, such as customers, supervisors, and colleagues (the focus of the first two lenses) but also those who are linked to non-work domains, such as spouses, children, family members, and friends, who can have an equally significant impact on overall salesperson success.

Consequently, when the seller was considered as a stakeholder, it was found that salesperson success was often framed through the lens of a personalizer, i.e., the extent to which salespeople are able to design their own career trajectories and adopt certain aspects of their work to be in line with their individual circumstances and personal preferences for the overall sense of well-being. Speaking from the salesforce management perspective, Natalie [FG 2] elaborated on how such an understanding of salespeople can be useful:

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What each individual person wants out of their career could be different. Is it growth? Is it overall development? Is it an image? Helping that person develop their skills to get there, and be successful in their current role, and have the ability to go into other roles, that's what's needed. But it's going to look different for everybody!

Nate [FG 6] concurred and discussed his experience managing a diverse salesforce:

I do think it's our job as the company, as [firm name], to realize what motivates someone. And I'm gonna [sic] let [his sales team members] be their own individual! I can't put everybody in a box and say, "Hey, you know, you're going to chase these carrots I have out there for you!" when really that's not what's important.

In line with this lens, the final motivational theme that emerged was a need for customization among salespeople. As the quotes above illustrate, respondents often remarked on the importance of recognizing salespeople as distinct individuals, with diverse sets of needs, experiences, and preferences, who required approaches tailored to their work. Kent [FG 8] gave an example of two different members of his salesforce who required customized management approaches due to inherent differences:

One [salesperson] is strictly money-motivated...by the dollar. And you've got another [salesperson] that likes to be told he's doing a good job. Basically, he likes to be appreciated and feel, "Hey, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and everyone's happy!" So, yeah, there's some contrast.

In a lighter vein, Jake [FG 4] joked about how he wanted to demand compensation from his firm for all the road travel he undertook as part of his work but could not claim it due to company policy:

Give me a reimbursement for the miles I run up in my car! [laughs] Every three years, I'll burn up to thirty-five thousand bucks! You're not paying me for my car miles and all that matters!

Finally, Natalie [FG 2] remarked how salespeople are likely to have "differences in opinions and thoughts [about]...the management styles we prefer" and highlighted the problem with one-size-fits-all management approaches:

So, instead of treating someone like this cookie-cutter "Ok, I'm going to manage you the same way as I manage everyone else" way, you have to look at it for each individual person differently.

Respondent accounts reflected two additional enablers: fit and balance. The notion of fit was voiced mostly in relation to salespeople's perceptions of the extent to which their workplace was suited to them and their unique sets of needs. Ursula [FG 2] mentioned several salespeople who were "hopping around every few years or so in figuring out what the best fit is for them." In some cases, even non-monetary perks and incentives were factored into salespeople's perceptions when evaluating organizational suitability. For example, Nolan [FG 1] considered that a big reason for the popularity of firms like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon among young salesforce aspirants was "the perception is they treat their people extremely well – there's pop and coffee and snacks and baseball fields and volleyball fields [sic] or whatever." Natalie [FG 2] appreciated the sick leave policy at her firm: "If you want to take 15 days [of leave], you can; if you want to take 20 days, you can; if you want to take 25 days, you can." Ursula [FG 2] was happy as her workplace had "tons of little things like fun coffee machines or places to talk and hang out; it's not as much of a formal, dark-room-fluorescent- lighting that kind of thing." Finally, Tiffany [FG 7] spoke from a more senior perspective on hiring new salespeople:

I think that is what that boils down to; it understands those people. And it goes along with that onboarding process and training process, as understanding where the strengths lie and where they fit.

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In conjunction with the idea of fit was the idea of balance across different domains of a salesperson's life. Thus, if fit reflects the extent to which a firm is suitable for salespeople overall, then balance reflects the extent of flexibility they have in organizing different elements of their day-to-day life while working in that firm. For example, Trevor [FG 4] relished the "ability to take time off to go to school plays or basketball games or just dictate my own calendar, dictate my own schedule." Edward [FG 4] reported that "obviously if I were to [sell] more, it'd be better for the firm too, but I'm producing enough to live a very comfortable lifestyle, and I'm hitting a lot of my own personal goals." Emmott [FG 8] elaborated on the benefits of helping salespeople achieve balance in the face of what he considered an increasing trend among younger salesforce entrants to do what interests them:

So, [the salespeople] may want to attend dinner events, and they may even be paying for their way to go to those events! But it's their way of networking, right? It's in the evening, not in the morning. They've already taken the morning off to take the kids to school. So, I think part of it is the flexibility built into the schedule; they can do what they want when they want, and they pick the events they want to go to. We're finding a lot of our [salespeople] are joining groups like hiking groups and fishermen groups. And they join because they want to, not because it will bring them more business. They already have more business than they can handle.

Trevor [FG 4] agreed and stated:

There's a focus on your well-being, you know. Are you taking care of yourself physically? How are things at home? What's your work–life balance? A lot of our goals of being successful might be wrapped around some personal [definition of] well-being. We're going to be losing weight, continuing education, or something along those lines.

Finally, Tammy [FG 4] pointed out how ignoring this aspect of balance might have unfortunate consequences:

I think someone's well-being as an individual can affect their personal life. So, if they're unhappy, if they're not healthy mentally or physically, whatever the case may be, unfortunately, it trickles into your work life. So, that can affect your sales, your relationships with your co-workers, and ultimately your success at the company. I think it's important to be able to find your balance, not necessarily find a balance, find your balance. We're all different.

To summarize, when salespeople think of their own complex self as a key stakeholder in their work, then they evaluate their success through the lens of a personalizer as they jointly consider questions of fit and balance (regarding their situational needs and personal preferences) in their attempt to fulfill a need for customization regarding their careers. Doing so, as the quotes illustrate, results in a greater sense of well-being among salespeople on personal and professional fronts, thus improving the likelihood that salespeople stay satisfied in their jobs and choose to stay at their firms for a long period.

The trifocal perspective: a stakeholder-oriented framework of salesperson success and motivat... Overall, strong evidence supported the trifocal perspective when questions related to salesperson success and their motivational needs were considered. As presented in this study, adopting a service ecosystem perspective on sales (rather than the traditional dyadic perspective) helps take a closer look at how salespeople increasingly define their success within the context of their relationships with key stakeholders/actors in the selling process. The trifocal perspective is presented as a framework in Figure 1 and provides a theoretically robust yet operationally parsimonious framework for understanding three relationships that modern-day salespeople consider integral to their success. These relationships are linked to distinct

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motivational needs and associated enablers that salespeople consider focal to their work and their pursuit of success.

To summarize, the advisor lens emerged as the most useful frame for understanding how successful relationships between salespeople and their customers are anchored in need for identification as salespeople employ a combination of professional expertise and personal empathy to achieve a sense of familiarity with their customers in terms of business requirements and needs. Study findings further illustrate that doing so can increase trust among customers and result in a stronger salesperson–customer relationships.

Analogously, the entrepreneur lens was the most useful frame when trying to understand successful relationships between salespeople and their firms. Study findings indicate that salespeople attempt to fulfill a need for territorialization and a need for efficiency concerning their work, which they frequently view as being their private small businesses. To achieve the need for territorialization, salespeople frequently combine a sense of ownership and operational autonomy, conferred on them by their supervisors or a supportive organizational culture, to better define the scope and scale of their work. Similarly, to achieve the need for efficiency, salespeople frequently take advantage of available organizational structures and processes to better leverage the strengths of other departments within the selling organization that support salespeople in their work. As study findings show, doing so results in stronger skill and capability development among salespeople and help them better manage and grow their individual business footprints.

Finally, the personalizer lens was the most useful frame when looking at the sellers in terms of the relationship salespeople have with their own complex selves. As the findings indicate, salespeople frequently consider a combination of two things – the extent to which they find a sense of fit with their firms and the extent to which they can balance the work and non-work domains of their lives – when trying to fulfill a need for customization regarding the content and trajectory of their sales careers.

In conjunction with this summary, two additional features of this conceptual framework merit attention: malleability and variability. Malleability refers to the within-person fluidity of this trifocal perspective, in terms of the proportion in which the three lenses exist within a salesperson. For example, a salesperson might experience that the entrepreneur lens accounts for her perception of workplace success during the initial phases of her career that tend to focus on rapid growth and learning. Over time, however, this could shift, and the same salesperson may find that the personalizer lens becomes more useful at a later career stage as she begins to evaluate workplace success in terms of how well her firm's incentive structures or workplace policies suit her unique set of needs.

Variability, in contrast, refers to between-person differences that can (and are likely to) exist between different members of a firm's salesforce in their respective lens mixes. Thus, two salespeople in the same department in the same firm might have starkly different lens mixes. For instance, salesperson A might place a high value on her success as an advisor to her customers, while salesperson B might consider being a personalizer more important due to a personal focus on well-being.

In addition to malleability and variability, the study proposes that the precise composition of these lenses, within a salesperson and between different salespeople, is shaped by various institutional factors (at the market or firm-level) and personal factors (due to individual or situational differences). Table 3 provides a list (though not exhaustive) of examples of each factor. The possible impact that the factor can have across one or more of the three lenses is also noted. The study posits that lens composition may be impacted by (i) market- level factors of the selling organization's external environment, (ii) firm-level factors of the selling organization, (iii) individual factors related to inherent differences between salespeople, and (iv) situational factors. This

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allows for a wide range of factors to be considered in future research using this framework to explore how salespeople's motivational needs are impacted by, for instance, differences in the level of market competition or the prevalent culture in the selling organization's environment, differences in organizational climate or business practices between different firms, individual differences between salespeople's learning mindset and regulatory focus, and situational differences between salespeople in terms of vocational maturity and access to resources (see also Balasubramanian and Lee [10]; Brockner and Higgins [18]; Brown and Peterson [19]; Dweck [42]; Hofstede [53]; Ingram and Bellenger [56]; Khusainova et al. [69]; Ling, Floyd, and Baldridge [80]; Rotter [114]; Triandis [136]; Walker, Churchill, and Ford [146]).

Table 3. Potential impact of institutional and personal factors on lens composition.

Institutional factors Category Examples Potential impact Market-level factors: Factors pertaining to the selling organization's external environment

Market competition Higher levels of competition from salespeople of other selling organizations may require higher levels of expertise among salespeople to identify with their customers

Cultural normsIn contrast to individualistic cultures, collectivistic cultures often prize harmonious relationships over task achievement; thus, selling in such cultures may require higher levels of empathy among salespeople looking to identify with their customers

Industrial business practices

Industries that operate with more rigid codes of conduct (e.g., financial planning and insurance) may extend lower levels of ownership and autonomy to salespeople in their attempts at territorialization

Firm-level factors: Factors pertaining to the selling organization itself

Compensation, promotion, and recognition opportunities

Firms that place a higher weight on business expansion than on business maintenance when making decisions linked to compensation, promotion, and recognition may see greater demands among salespeople for higher levels of ownership and autonomy in their attempts at territorialization

Firm age In contrast to older firms, younger firms with limited business experience and/or resources may see greater demands among salespeople for stronger internal structures and processes in their quest for efficiency

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Institutional factors Category Examples Potential impact Organizational climate

Firms perceived as more supportive environments (e.g., in terms of the extent to which salespeople feel that their input is considered, that their needs are acknowledged and that they can grow and develop skills) may be perceived as workplaces where it is easier to achieve fit and balance, and therefore, customization

Personal factors Category Examples Potential impact Individual factors: Factors pertaining to inherent differences between salespeople

Growth mindset In contrast to salespeople who have a fixed mindset, those with a growth mindset may take greater advantage of professional development opportunities to improve their expertise, empathy, and ownership, thus helping them achieve identification and territorialization

Locus of control

In contrast to salespeople with an external locus of control (who believe that events are largely determined by external influences beyond one's control), those with an internal locus of control (who believe that one's own actions drive results) may put in greater effort in achieving ownership and autonomy, and thus territorialization

Regulatory focus

In contrast to prevention-focused salespeople who prioritize safety, promotion-focused salespeople who prioritize hope and accomplishment may put in greater effort to achieve identification and territorialization

Situational factors: Factors pertaining to circumstantial differences between salespeople

Access to resources Salespeople with greater access to financial and social resources (e.g., disposable income, skill development and networking opportunities outside work, childcare facilities, and family support) may find it easier to pursue professional development opportunities that could help them achieve identification and territorialization

Vocational maturity

Salespeople in earlier stages of their career may seek ownership and autonomy to prove themselves, and prioritize territorialization; those in later stages of their career may seek fit and balance, and prioritize customization

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Institutional factors Category Examples Potential impact Generational cohort

In contrast to salespeople in older generation cohorts (such as baby boomers and Generation X), those in younger generation cohorts (such as Millennials and Generation Z) may be more likely to prioritize customization

The trifocal perspective, therefore, provides a comprehensive yet parsimonious account of salesperson success and motivation that can account for salespeople's diverse motivational needs concerning their crucial stakeholder relationships. The framework also allows for within- and between-person variations that are part and parcel of any modern salesforce. Thus, in the final section, the theoretical and managerial implications of the research are presented, as well as suggested avenues for future research.

Discussion

Theoretical implications Salespeople are integral to business success and are consistently expected to perform at a high level in terms of securing revenue while simultaneously juggling an ever-increasing roster of customer demands (Agnihotri et al. [ 2]; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]). Salespeople are not only required to recognize, maintain, and mitigate various conflicting obstacles but also are expected to keep up with emerging trends in the selling process (Banin et al. [13]; Gabler, Rapp, and Richey [46]). Given this dynamic and evolving nature of professional selling, the inevitable increase in complexity in salespeople's jobs and their environments requires broader theoretical frameworks for salesperson success and motivation that can incorporate this complexity (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Khusainova et al. [69]).

This study takes the first step in addressing the theoretical gap by using a qualitative approach to explore perceptions of salesperson success and motivation among sales professionals. The trifocal perspective provides a theoretical framework that adopts a service ecosystem view of selling to frame salesperson success through three lenses, along with their associated motivational needs and enablers, linked to salespeople's relationships with the key stakeholders in the selling process. Collectively, the framework contributes to sales theory in several distinct ways.

The first contribution is the integrative nature of the framework. Previous researchers generated several insights into buyer–seller relationships, intra-organizational dynamics of sales roles, or factors such as quality of life and well-being (Bande et al. [11]; Edmondson, Matthews, and Ambrose [43]; Lyngdoh, Liu, and Sridhar [83]; Plouffe [107]), usually by focusing on a specific salesperson–stakeholder relationship. This focus was sufficient in the traditional dyadic perspective of sales. However, modern salespeople frequently juggle relationships with multiple stakeholders simultaneously. The trifocal perspective allows for simultaneous consideration of these different relationships through the metaphor of the three lenses that frame the capacities in which salespeople appear to act in their pursuit of success regarding each set of relationships. The framework, therefore, integrates a salesperson's job complexity and their multi-stakeholder ecosystem with their perceptions of success and their motivational needs, in line with the theoretical gap (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Khusainova et al. [69]; Seriki et al. [121]). The framework allows for variations in the composition of the perspective within- and between-salespeople due to its interplay with institutional and personal factors. Thus, the framework is flexible to accommodate intra- and inter-organizational differences while retaining theoretical parsimony. The framework can tie together previous findings regarding drivers of

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salesperson success into one comprehensive framework that provides a balanced focus across all key stakeholders.

As the second major contribution, this study extends and enriches previous research on salesperson motivation. A rich corpus of insights regarding the components of salesperson motivation (such as IM and EM), as well as its antecedents and consequences, has been generated. The proposed framework shows how salespeople's motivational needs, in addition to being intrinsic or extrinsic, can differ in other ways, as needs are anchored in the context of salespeople's relationships with their key stakeholders. A stronger understanding of salesperson motivation through this approach can help pave the way for future scholarly work on how to align salesforce management strategies with such motivational needs and associated salesperson expectations (Mallin et al. [87]; Soscia, Bagozzi, and Guenzi [123]). Recognizing these fine-grained differences in motivational needs can also help strengthen the link between salesperson motivation and outcome variables that might be more important to a younger salesforce, such as innovativeness, creativity, quality of life, subjective well-being, and work–life balance (Badrinarayanan et al. [ 8]; Bai, Li, and Lin [ 9]; Fujimoto et al. [45]; Menguc et al. [90]; Miao and Wang [92]). Thus, the framework can serve as a stepping stone for future advances within salesperson motivation research.

The third and final contribution of the research stems from the use of a service ecosystem perspective on selling to address the growing complexity in the field of professional selling (Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo [51]; Schmitz and Ganesan [117]; Seriki et al. [121]). Previous sales researchers did not adopt this holistic perspective as it is still in a nascent stage. The study findings provide strong evidence that this framework is suitable for analyzing the modern marketplace and obtaining a broader picture of the scenarios that salespeople face regularly. The qualitative approach adds to the confidence that the findings represent the real world and the lived experience of sales professionals with their associated tensions, dilemmas, and challenges.

Managerial implications Given the structure of the trifocal perspective, three sets of implications arise for salesforce managers, each linked to a distinct lens, associated need(s), and associated enablers. Starting with the advisor lens, it was evident that salespeople pursue a need for identification in their relationships with their customers, and that this pursuit is aided by salespeople's professional expertise and personal empathy. Managers, therefore, must try to cultivate expertise by ensuring that their team members get sufficient opportunities to become proficient across all stages of the selling process and become adept in handling all related tasks and responsibilities. For developing expertise, sales managers and trainers should not only focus on providing product-related knowledge but also train salespeople to be better listeners and improve their empathetic ability. Sales managers and coaches can help salespeople be better active listeners so that they are able to improve their empathetic ability by teaching them to ask customers follow-up questions, request more details, interrupt less when a customer is talking, and show eagerness and genuine care for customers' concerns. Salespeople should also be educated on need identification strategies, such as SPIN Selling, ADAPT selling, and Challenger sale strategies, and how to utilize social media and big data to connect and understand customer situations better. Similarly, managers must also lead by example in demonstrating empathetic behavior with customers. Establishing the importance of taking the customer's perspective when trying to understand the nature of problems they might be facing and/or not berating salespeople when they attempt to side with their customers to protect their interests could go a long way in instilling a sense of empathy among salespeople.

Analogously, for the entrepreneur lens, salespeople pursue a need for territorialization and a need for efficiency in their relationships with their firms. The former is aided by a sense of ownership and operational autonomy.

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The latter is aided by available organizational structures and internal business processes. Collectively, they lead to a wide range of implications for the selling organization. From a supervisory standpoint, salespeople clearly benefit from managers who provide adequate freedom in terms of letting them try new things, take calculated risks, and even customize certain elements of their sales approaches without requiring constant check-ins and approvals. At the same time, however, supervisors need to know where to draw the line so that salespeople do not overstep their boundaries too early in their careers. From an inter-departmental standpoint, firms should try and ensure that departments and/or functions on whom salespeople depend for their day-to- day work provide satisfactory co-operation and co-ordination, and do not become bottlenecks that impede salesperson performance. Finally, from a cultural point of view, firms should strive to promote a transparent and supportive organizational culture marked by open communication channels for salespeople to suggest ideas and get feedback, innovation readiness in terms of encouraging salespeople try out new ideas even if they might not work, and mentorship opportunities to help salespeople learn from more experienced members.

Last, for the personalizer lens, salespeople pursue a need for customization in their relationships with themselves, a quest helped along by a better fit with their firms and improved balance of the demands on salespeople's time. There is a greater need among selling organizations, especially among their human resources team and/or the members responsible for the recruitment, training, and promotion stages, to explicitly acknowledge and incorporate salespeople's situational and individual differences during all those stages. For example, human resources and recruitment teams need to understand that when millennials and Gen Zs evaluate career opportunities, they consider more than compensation. They are motivated by job flexibility, fair treatment, management transparency, mentoring, and social responsibility (Deloitte [35]). In contrast, baby boomers value self-respect and are motivated by money, position, and prestige (Berkup [15]). For compensation, baby boomers prefer monetary rewards; millennials prefer freedom. In addition, for work– family balance, baby boomers often prioritize their work; millennials have a clear separation between work and family (Berkup [15]). Previous researchers frequently emphasized the importance of recognizing differences between salesforce members. Kohli ([70]) found that salespeople who differ in self-esteem, experience, and self-perceived performance have heterogeneous needs and expectations for supervisory behavior, thus necessitating an adaptive supervisory style based on a closer examination of salesperson traits. This takes the form of customized motivational techniques developed jointly by sales managers and salespeople (Demirdjian [36]; Jackson, Keith, and Schlacter [59]).

In sum, the study recommends that firms take a closer look at their salesforce management approaches and move from one-size-fits-all or cookie-cutter approaches toward individualized approaches to accommodate salespeople's diverse motivational needs, situational differences, and individual preferences. This approach can also help group salespeople into clusters based on whether they think of themselves primarily as advisors, as entrepreneurs, as personalizers, or as is more likely, a composite of these lenses. Such a comprehensive view of salespeople can go a long way in better understanding their differences and thus, help maximize the potential of each salesperson in the selling organization (Kumar, Sunder, and Leone [73]; Morris et al. [99]).

Future research directions The study findings represent the first foray into conceptualizing salesperson success as a mix of three distinct lenses with underlying motivational needs. Consequently, there are several fertile avenues for future research within the sales domain, ranging from scale development and context-specific studies to continued theory development on salesperson motivation and behavior, which are presented in Table 4.

Table 4. Future research directions.

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Research domainFuture directionsResearch domainFuture directions Framework development and operationalization

Scale development for measuring sales professionals' perceptions of the extent to which the four motivational needs are met along with their assessments of the extent to which key enablers for each need are accessible in their present roles and organizations The use of alternative empirical approaches (e.g., content analysis, depth interviews, and secondary research) to uncover additional nuances and links that could further enrich the framework

Context-specific explorations

Exploratory studies on how the trifocal perspective varies across roles, territories, firms, and industries to get a clearer understanding of contextual variations, specifically in terms of the impact of institutional and personal factors on lens composition Cross-cultural studies on whether and how the trifocal perspective differs across international markets and sales cultures

Intersection with self- determination theory (Deci and Ryan 1980)

Investigations into how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (as identified by SDT) shape salesperson perceptions of success, especially given how respondent accounts reflected varying combinations of intrinsic (e.g., ambition, drive, and personality) and extrinsic (e.g., commissions and financial incentives) drivers Investigations into the interplay between the four motivational needs comprising the trifocal perspective and the three SDT needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence, especially in conjunction with the moderating influence of institutional and personal factors in such scenarios and the associated downstream implications on satisfaction and well-being

Theory development of salesperson motivation and behavior

The use of the trifocal framework as a starting point for richer and more complex models that can better incorporate novel mediators and moderators (such as situational and individual differences in judgment and decision-making (Taylor et al. 2020) among salespeople), thus facilitating deeper inquiry via within-subject research designs, multilevel frameworks, ecosystemic perspectives, and longitudinal research approaches (Bolander, Dugan, and Jones 2017; Hartmann, Wieland, and Vargo 2018; Varela et al. 2019)

In conclusion, the trifocal perspective on salesperson success and motivation can be employed in various ways for future academic inquiries into related topics that could significantly enrich research discourses within the marketing discipline in general, and the sales domain in particular.

Declaration of interest No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Footnotes 1 Contributed equally.

2 Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2020.1805748.

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~~~~~~~~ By Duleep Delpechitre; Aditya Gupta; Arash H. Zadeh; Joon Ho Lim and Steven A. Taylor

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