Sales Principles: The Case of Rules and Standards

摘要

Leading companies such as Google, Apple, Amgen, Cisco, and Intel are increasingly relying on simplifying rales, heuristics, and principles to provide guidance to managers in increasingly complex competitive environments (e.g., Bingham and Eisenhardt 2011; Challagalla, Murtha, and Jaworski 2014). For instance, recent research suggests that simple salesforce rules such as "Target the audit group within customer organizations to get sales" (Bingham and Eisenhardt, 2011, p. 1447) can be very beneficial to firms because they provide useful heuristics that are easily remembered, shared, and understood by organizational members (e.g., Bingham and Eisenhardt, 2011). Although this emerging research has had a significant theoretical (Bingham and Eisenhardt, 2011; Davis, Eisenhardt, and Bingham, 2009) and practical (e.g., Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001) impact on field of sales and marketing, surprisingly little is known about the articulation of simple sales rules.