Paper By UC Prof Awarded
Top Research Honor By Marketing Group

A paper co-authored by Andrea Dixon of UC's marketing faculty has been awarded the top research award for the year by the Sales Special Interest Group of the American Marketing Association.

Dixon's paper, "Successful and Unsuccessful Sales Calls: Measuring Salesperson Attributions and Behavioral Intentions," earned the group's 2002 Excellence in Research Award at its 2002 Summer Educators Conference in San Diego. The article was published in the July 2001 edition of the Journal of Marketing.

Dixon's article introduces a behavioral framework that helps managers predict how their sales people will react after failing to make a sale. Two colleagues from Indiana University, Maqbul Jamil and Rosann Spiro, collaborated with Dixon on the article.

"Sales is probably the most brutal profession, say next to boxing. And, as such, this profession which attracts a large portion of the U.S. employment base requires people who can deal with constant rejection," says Dixon of her study. "My colleagues and I set out to discover how people make sense of those failures or - to go back to boxing - which failures knock them out and which allow them to continue on."

The study measured responses from 228 financial services representatives about a recent sales interaction and how those individuals would react in the future when a sale is on the line. The study predicts when sales people are most likely to give up. "Managers would find this of value because we are giving them ways to measure how people make sense of their failures and the likely response that they'll have to those failures," she says.