Research On The Determinants Of The Sales Performance Based On Salesperson Learning

Salesperson’s performance plays a critical role in long-term success of the company. As aresult, the determinants of the salesperson’s performance have attracted the managers and theresearchers’ interest for a longtime.In this era, change is a given, salesperson has to learn in a continuous basis to keep upwith the pace of the time and to be adapted to the change. In addition, with theknowledge-intensive economy coming and the prevalence of Internet, the customer can getmore information more easily than before, so that salesperson has to keep updating theknowledge and skill to meet the customer’s increasing need. However, the study of therelationship between learning and sales performance was just on the threshold, and theresearchers tend to pay more attention on organization learning than individual learning.Therefore, this paper will study the relationship between learning effort and performance.On the basis of the existing relevant literature, this paper focuses on the learning effortand formulates a conceptual model to explore the effects of personality (proactive personality)and job characteristics (job autonomy) on learning effort and sales performance, the effect oflearning effort on sales performance, and the mediating role of learning effort.This paper proposed6hypotheses, and analyzed the collected234samples through SPSS20.0and AMOS20.0. This paper used statistical analysis method including descriptiveanalysis, confirmatory factor analysis, variance analysis, and tested the hypotheses withstructural equation modeling. The main conclusions are summarized as follow:(1) The salesperson’s learning effort positively affects sales performance.(2) The proactive personality and job autonomy positively affects learning effort.(3) The proactive personality positively affects learning performance.(4) The relationship between job autonomy and sales performance is not significant.(5) The learning effort partially mediates the relationship between proactive personalityand performance, fully mediates the one between job autonomy and performance.Based on the conclusions above, this paper also provides the managers with some adviceon the salesperson management and selection. Also we have a deeper understanding of themechanism of how performance is gained which contributes to the theories of the research onthe determinants of sales performance.