Evidence · B2B marketing

B2B sales management: sales force design, territories and channels

Sales force size, territory design and effort allocation can be set with decision models, and decades of applied work suggest that profit is flat across a wide range of sales force sizes while most territories are badly sized. Research on social selling and digital content marketing is growing but still mostly conceptual or interview based. Claims about omnichannel buying and challenger-style selling come from consultancy reports and a practitioner book, not peer-reviewed tests.

Definition

B2B sales management covers how a company organizes and steers its sales function: how many salespeople to employ, how to assign accounts and territories to them, how to allocate their effort, and which channels to sell through. It now includes social selling, in which salespeople use social and digital channels to find and engage buyers, digital content marketing along the buyer's journey, and the mix of self-service, remote and in-person selling known as omnichannel.

What the research finds

Sales force size matters less than its allocation

Insights from more than 2,000 sales force projects in over 50 countries suggest that profit is flat across a wide range of sales force sizes, that growing a sales force in phases is rarely optimal, that focused strategies beat scattered ones, and that about 55 percent of territories are either too large or too small.^[1]

Territory models need local knowledge

Across roughly 1,500 territory alignment projects for 500 companies, optimization models alone could not fully solve territory design because of competing objectives and effects on people. Combining model output with local managers' knowledge produced high implementation rates.^[2]

Social selling is broader than social media use

A systematic review combined with a field study of social selling professionals defines social selling as applying digital marketing principles at the level of the individual salesperson, using social and digital channels to understand and engage prospects and customers at relevant points in their journey.^[3]

Digital content marketing depends on customer-centric execution

Interviews with 56 managers at 36 B2B firms that invest heavily in digital content marketing identify the activities needed to make it customer-centric along the journey, and propose conditions under which it performs better or worse. These propositions have not yet been tested quantitatively.^[4]

Buyers mix channels across the journey

A consultancy report argues that B2B buyers now expect self-service, remote and in-person options at different stages of buying, making omnichannel selling the default. The evidence is survey data from a consulting firm, not peer-reviewed measurement.^[5]

Challenger selling is a hypothesis, not a finding

A widely read practitioner book claims that top sellers bring customers new insight, tailor their message to each stakeholder and take control of the conversation. It rests on the authors' own practitioner research and should be treated as a hypothesis to test.^[6]

How strong is the evidence?

The sales force sizing and territory insights come from decades of applied projects by the same authors; they are practical lessons rather than independent tests, and the profit effects are not reported as effect sizes. Social selling and digital content marketing research is conceptual or interview based, so its performance claims are propositions. The shift to omnichannel buying and the challenger model rest on a consultancy report and a practitioner book, and their effects on revenue have not been measured in peer-reviewed work. Account-based marketing, often discussed alongside these topics, is not covered by the studies reviewed here.

References

Prabhakant Sinha, Andris A. Zoltners (2001). Sales-Force Decision Models: Insights from 25 Years of Implementation. Interfaces.
Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha (2005). The 2004 ISMS Practice Prize Winner—Sales Territory Design: Thirty Years of Modeling and Implementation. Marketing Science.
Chiara Ancillai, Harri Terho, Silvio Cardinali, Federica Pascucci (2019). Advancing social media driven sales research: Establishing conceptual foundations for B-to-B social selling. Industrial Marketing Management.
Harri Terho, Joel Mero, Lotta Siutla, Elina Jaakkola (2022). Digital content marketing in business markets: Activities, consequences, and contingencies along the customer journey. Industrial Marketing Management.
Liz Harrison, Dennis Spillecke, Jennifer Stanley, Jenny Tsai (2021). Omnichannel in B2B Sales: The New Normal in a Year That Has Been Anything But. McKinsey & Company (report).
Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson (2011). MATTHEW DIXON and BRENT ADAMSON.

Bibliographic details only. Follow the DOI to read each study at its publisher.

Building on this evidence?

ScholarSignal checks a new research idea against the closest existing work and an editor rubric, and tells you whether the contribution is new enough for the journals you target.

Evaluate my idea for free