SALESPERSONS' PERFORMANCE IN IT/ITES SECTOR
Authors:   CMR University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Saha Sumit , Kar Subhasree ,   CMR University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Published: April 2023

The research work on “Impact of Cross-Functional Factors on Salesperson’s Performance: A Statistical Model for IT/ITes”, is the basis of which is a survey, on sales achievement and revenue generation for the company, that was conducted among 330+ salespersons from 90+ IT/ITes companies in Bangalore, India. The question was very simple, Can we identify the cross functional indicators and to compute the ‘sales performance score’ to know the benchmark of company’s sales status to avoid the future failure and/or success? The Salespersons’ performance is important for better company performance. This is directly linked, however, most of the cases companies are reluctant to understand the truth either/or the hidden issues which may affect directly salespersons’ performance. Hence, discovering the hidden factors and calculating a benchmark ‘performance score’ were of utmost interest. Cross-functional sales factors plays an important role in overall sales performance, and the numeric benchmark. The purpose of this exploratory research is to identify the cross-functional variables forming final factors through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), specifically, in B2B context and a sales achievement predictor model to interpret and quantify the influences (salespersons performance score) specifically to the IT/ITes companies. The literature study concluded with 33 individual variables formed 35 questions for data collection (conducted over 10 months duration). Three outliers were removed after “Mahalanobis Distance Test” for Multivariate analysis, and dropped two variables by MNAR (‘Missing value Not at Random’). Finally, fifteen (15) determinants formed four (4) reliable factors after dimension reduction technique. This research clearly tries to identify the impact of cross-functional sales performance factors which time to time put negative or, positive effect on the overall organization’s sales performance and the revenue growth of the company. This also leads to the better support to sales team towards the revenue closure. This study also aims to create a sales performance model to compute the sales performance score through which companies can understand their current state of sales performance with respect to the benchmark of the industry. This score will be able to interpret the meaning that why they do not able to achieve their targets due to non-support from cross functional factors. The research question was formulated together with my supervisor(s). The research was difficult, but conducting extensive investigation has allowed me to answer the question that we identified. Fortunately, the final destination and the research outcomes were as similar as expected at the time of framing the research initially. The study also concludes with a salesforce performance predictor model. Focusing on these identified factors companies can understand what is preventing its salesforce from giving their best performance. Researcher contributes in creating a predictive model and computation of ‘sales performance score’, based on the final factor loading values. This would be unique and unprecedented to measure the current industry performance benchmark by quantifying its company specific at the moment performance standard value, for better strategic support towards the achievement of desired sales performance.Keywords: Sales performance score, Salesperson’s performance, predictive modelling, Mahalanobis Distance test for outliers, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, MNAR, , Multi variate Analysis