Special Session: Measuring Salesperson Storytelling: An Abstract

Abstract

In general, people find stories far more compelling than presentations. The importance of storytelling in business has even caught the recent attention of practitioners and scholars. For example, a recent article in Forbes suggests that effective storytelling could lead to increased profitability by enabling a firm to deftly and emotively express its capabilities as well as clearly differentiating itself from competitors. For organizations, salespeople, acting as boundary spanners, are the primary storytellers of the firm. In the literature, salesperson storytelling is currently defined as a “discourse dealing with interrelated actions and consequences in a chronological order” in order to drive sales. While past research has recognized the importance and produced meaningful insights on this phenomenon, it is too general to effectively provide guidance to researchers and practitioners. That is, it is likely that the notion of storytelling is a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than we currently understand it to be. Furthermore, much remains to be known about how to empirically capture and operationalize storytelling. As such, further research is needed in order to identify and offer a way to empirically measure storytelling. Toward this end, this study attempts to take a much-needed step towards unveiling the nature of salesperson storytelling and to offer a usable instrument that can be used to measure it. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to employ a careful and rigorous scale development process and test the nomological net, consisting of a multi-study approach to generating items, scale purification, and testing predictive validity. This research contributes to the marketing literature by (1) conceptualizing a comprehensive definition of salesperson storytelling, (2) developing and validating a scale for salesperson storytelling, and (3) empirically showing that salesperson storytelling has an effect on job-related outcomes.