BAR - Brazilian Administration Review

14

Authors: Valter Afonso Vieira, Danny Pimentel Claro

Sales management is an integral part of virtually all market exchanges. Marketing team, sales opportunities, salesperson skills, firm sales resources, digital platforms, and sales compensation plan create a marketing-salesperson-firm dynamic underlying the sales prospecting framework. Firm’s managers continuously strive to deal with these manifold elements of such dynamic context. This article offers an overview of the sales prospecting effort and sheds light on how firms generate superior performance by managing three interconnected elements. The marketing team (e.g., generating leads), salesperson competence (e.g., individual and team competence), and the firm being ready to deploy sales structure (e.g., sales platform) result in superior performance. By thinking outside the box, the authors propose the Salespeople Prospecting Framework with multiple associations based on previous marketing, sales, and retail research. The authors discuss implications for managing the sales funnel and offer suggestions for further research investigation.

17

Authors: Marco Antonio Catussi Paschoalotto, João Luiz Passador, Cláudia Souza Passador, Pedro Henrique de Oliveira

Access to public education for many specialists is the most potent policy toward achieving an equitable and fair society. To accomplish this challenging goal, there must exist an efficient and effective public system. Therefore, to support and expand the issue, we have developed a study that focuses on the impacts that socioeconomic conditions have on efficiency and efficacy at the basic education level in municipalities from the state of São Paulo, Brazil. In order to achieve our main goal, we performed a descriptive statistical analysis, a correlation analysis, and three multiple linear regressions. First, the descriptive study exhibited public education inequality between the municipalities. Following this, the correlation analysis pointed out a positive and significant correlation amongst socioeconomic conditions as well as a more efficient and effective model. Finally, three multiple linear regressions demonstrate a positive and significant impact concerning the economic status between the social condition and the efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness in public schools run by municipal authorities. Therefore, this paper generates an advance toward local government performance studies, through the analysis of possible impacts concerning socioeconomic conditions in the 3Es at the basic education level.

31

Authors: Fernando Antônio Ribeiro Serra, Manuel Portugal Ferreira, Isabel Cristina Scafuto

We examined how scholars decide what they study, scrutinizing researchers’ problem choice. We qualitatively analyzed a survey conducted by e-mail with 40 top management scholars on organizational decline in top-ranked journals. This topic appears to be neglected despite the real life evidence that the performance of firms is declining at an increasingly rapid pace. We conducted a content analysis of motivation to undertake, remain with, or abandon research. We found explanations for what researchers’ study specifically related to concerns over tenure and promotion, difficulty in conducting research, and the general unattractiveness of ‘negative’ themes that lead scholars to avoid a research topic. We contribute to studies on problem choice in management research by explaining why relevant economic and societal research agendas are under-researched. Our findings indicate that motivation not to undertake is related to extrinsic factors. Motivations to remain are usually intrinsic. However, motivations to abandon may be intrinsic, in order to move on to another research project, or extrinsic, depending on the situation. It also serves as a warning that scholars may be paying excessive attention to mainstream theoretical approaches and topics, inhibiting the emergence of new ideas and detracting attention from phenomena that are important for teaching.