Tuba Ustuner
DBA in Marketing
Dissertation Chair: Prof. R. Deshpande
Selling in Knowledge-Intensive Contexts: The Role of Social Capital
Knowledge is the most critical asset of the 21st century firm. So not surprisingly an extensive literature has discussed almost all aspects of knowledge. One aspect that is most relevant to the firm's profitability, however, is left unexamined: Selling knowledge.
In three complimentary research papers I begin to fill this gap by shedding light on following questions: Is selling in knowledge-intensive markets different from selling in other types of markets? If so, then how? What are the particular challenges that salespeople face in these markets? What resources do they rely upon to overcome these challenges?
The first paper reports the findings of the exploratory phase of the study, which compares the knowledge intensive markets to the conventional sales contexts, and distinguishes the particular characteristics of knowledge intensive sales contexts. It decomposes the sales process into three stages and discusses the distinct task requirements and challenges of each. Then it compares the effective salespeople's sales approach to that of their less effective colleagues. The comparison suggests that the effective salespeople manage the challenges of knowledge intensive markets differently than their less effective colleagues. While the former enact a network sales model, the latter have a dyadic approach to sales. The network model drives the performance of the former group because the individual level resources of the salespeople (i.e. human capital) are not sufficient to overcome the distinct challenges of these markets. Knowledge intensive sales contexts require diverse resources. And these are embedded in the organizational networks. Salespeople who had invested in developing and maintaining their network ties -who had high social capital- had more access to these diverse network resources than the salespeople who had a dyadic sales approach. They knew where a particular resource is embedded within the network, and mobilized it at the right time to create value for their customers. They as a result performed better than the salespeople who solely focused their sales efforts on customers.
The second study, using socio-centric network data gathered at 12 regional offices tests the main effect of social capital on performance. After controlling for human capital differences among salespeople, social capital indeed was a significant driver of overall effectiveness in selling knowledge.
The third study pushes the main-effect finding one step further, and builds a contingent framework that explains how salespeople use investments in specific forms of social capital to improve their effectiveness in knowledge intensive contexts. The three sales tasks identified in the exploratory stage, with their distinct knowledge requirements constitute an excellent context for that purpose. The results provide support for a new view of organizational actors as managers of a portfolio of social capitals: the makeup of each form of social capital is structured by the contingent knowledge needs of the task. For effectiveness in opportunity identification structural embeddedness, for effectiveness in order generation relational embeddedness and for solution creation both were required. Finally, this study demonstrates that a third feature of social capital-what I call selectivity-plays a significant role when conditions allow actors to optimize their social capital investments beyond the strategies suggested by relational and structural embeddedness.
