The impact of social capital and transaction efficacy on salesperson performance

Abstract

In business-to-business (B2B) markets, salespeople often act as market-makers, connecting customers with suppliers while collaborating with other salespeople to form a complex network of relationships. The authors propose that in such a relationship network, the salesperson's social capital, or “who they know,” and transaction efficacy, or “what they do,” have direct and interactive effects on performance. To test the proposed model, the authors use a transaction-level dataset from a large brokerage firm in the residential construction materials industry. The dataset spans 3 years, enabling authors to observe changes in network structure and model the interplay between social capital and transaction efficacy and their impact on performance. They find that while a salesperson's social capital has a direct effect on performance, these effects are contingent on the salesperson's transaction efficacy. With these results, the authors establish that the joint consideration of the salesperson's network position and transaction efficacy are important determinants of salesperson performance.