Christian Schmitz

How does the influence of the marketing department within an organization affect marketing managers' dissemination of market intelligence (i.e., knowledge about customer needs and competitor activities) to managers of other departments? Three studies with 711 executive managers and integrated survey and experimental data offer insights. Rather than the positive relationship indicated by conventional wisdom, the study results indicate a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped effect of marketing's influence on marketing managers' dissemination of market intelligence. Managers in a marketing department with moderate influence within the organization are significantly more likely to disseminate market intelligence than are those in low and, interestingly, those in high influence departments. This finding adds nuance to the existing body of knowledge showing countervailing effects of a strong marketing department and implies that executives need to carefully manage the organization's culture to ensure well-balanced influences of the marketing department in relation to other corporate functions.

To determine which company internal prerequisites must be in place and managed to realize a successful cross-selling strategy and to find answers on how to overcome cross-selling obstacles. Qualitative and quantitative data from various industries provide insights into the implementation of a successful cross-selling strategy. Qualitative data serve to derive the hypotheses and constructs and design quantitative measures. Structural equation modeling with data from a management survey of an industrial glass manufacturer tests the proposed effects. The cross-divisional orientation of a company affects the realization of cross-selling potential and the number of product divisions a salespersons sells. These factors then influence the salesperson's motivation and readiness to engage in cross-selling activities, which finally affect the company's overall cross-selling success. A salesperson's state of mind has the greatest impact on cross-selling success. Research implications: Similar results might be expected for various other industries, which need to be tested. The findings could be enhanced by incorporating a wider range of customer characteristics into the analysis, as well as other mediating or moderating variables. There is a clear need to enable cross-divisional acting and thinking among salespeople. Managers should foster cross-selling motivation and invest in specific training and recruitment to increase the dissemination of knowledge across divisions and reassure salespeople about offering various products. This contribution to current practice clarifies why cross-selling often does not work and why it remains so challenging to realize. The combination of three sources of data-qualitative, objective, and quantitative-advances cross-selling research by considering internal obstacles to cross-selling and revealing ways to overcome them.

As previous research demonstrates, few firms provide full pricing authority to their sales representatives (in the following: sales reps), and those sales representatives who do have full pricing authority may offer too many price concessions in their effort to close the sale. Thus, many sales managers lose the opportunity to use salespeople's superior customer knowledge to exploit their customers' willingness to pay. This study investigates how a company might steer sales reps during price negotiations while still giving them full pricing authority. The proposed instrument is simple to understand, easy to implement, fairly inexpensive, and effective; it posits that the kind of cost information that sales reps receive affects both their cognitive references and their negotiation behavior, which in turn affect negotiated prices. Electronically mediated negotiations in an experimental setting with 119 student dyads (Study 1), as well as replications of the findings using 41 dyads of key account managers (Study 2), indicate that undifferentiated cost information (full costs without information on direct costs) leads to higher reference prices (reservation price, target price, and first offer), as well as stronger attacking behavior and weaker coordinating behavior. These effects yield higher sales prices, and therefore more profit for the company. These results offer sales managers valuable insights into the "black box" of negotiations, which may be particularly helpful for steering sales reps in a situation in which they have full pricing authority.