The interplay between objective and subjective measures of salesperson performance: towards an integrated approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The frameworks to measure salesperson performance have not advanced in parallel with the degree of transformation of professional selling. To address this issue, research in organizational performance advocates for the use of more comprehensive and integrated measurement frameworks, incorporating both objective and subjective measures. However, in sales research, this integrated approach is rare, with most studies using either objective or subjective measurement. Thus, in this article, we explore the combined use of objective and subjective measures of salesperson performance. We conduct a systematic review of sales performance and then investigate empirically, through a survey of 207 salespeople and 39 interviews with sales leaders, the specific role played by subjective measures of individual sales performance. A key finding of the study is the widespread use of diverse measures of performance in practice and the limited measurement approaches used in sales research. We contribute by articulating the differences in the conceptualization and operationalization of salesperson performance between industry practice and scholarly research. We propose a set of principles for selecting measures of performance in sales and present a framework that extends current conceptualizations of effectiveness and efficiency by incorporating a third dimension, competency, that also needs to be measured.Supplemental data for this article is available online at
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".