Sales Quotas: Unintended Consequences on Trust in Organization, Customer-Oriented Selling, and Sales Performance

Despite a growing strategic, operational, and research spotlight on relational building and retention in recent years, practitioners must balance this vision with commonly critical selling practices and needs (i.e., obtain sales quota while building and retaining customer relationships). In such an environment, this paper proposes that marketers can prosper if they more fully understand the connections between sales quotas and other important organizational issues (i.e., trust in the organization, customer-oriented selling, and sales performance). The significance of sales quotas as a directing force has been noted by researchers and practitioners for some time. Yet beyond their obvious influence (e.g., as sales goals), little is understood as to what extent these frequently utilized performance objectives connect and impact other critical organizational issues within the selling group. Using a sample of 345 business-to-business salespeople, this study explores how the application of sales quotas have far-reaching organizational implications, beyond goal setting and reward mechanisms, to include issues of organizational trust, customer-oriented selling, and sales performance. To explore these connections, a model grounded in both sales force control theory and goal-setting theory is developed and then tested using structural equation modeling. The results suggest that perceptions of quota difficulty are negatively related to salespeople's trust in the organization and their sales performance, and trust in the organization positively affects customer-oriented selling, which positively affects sales performance. Detailed managerial implications and research opportunities offered by the findings are presented.