Understanding Salespeople's Resistence to, and Acceptance and Leadership of Customer-Driven Change

Salespeople’s responses to change have been extensively examined in the context of sales literature, sales force automation (SFA), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other sales technologies. The majority of sales technology changes were typically organization driven. In contrast, during the COVID-19 pandemic, salespeople faced changing sales processes that were increasingly customer-driven. We seek a deeper understanding of salespeople’s acceptance of customer-driven change and interview 38 sales professionals to enhance our understanding of salespeople’s perceptions and behaviors. Our findings show an increase in the use of technology, increased marketing-sales integration, and shifts in sales processes and organizations. We identify three profiles of salespeople: those that resist change, accept change, and lead change. We find differences in salespeople driven by their perceptions of customer environments and their capabilities, sales management function, and organization factors relevant in defining attitude towards change. We consequently derive implications for theory and practice.