Empirical research in relationship management has tended to take a snapshot of a relationship at a given time and attempt to project its trajectory, despite agreement among researchers that a longitudinal perspective focused on process models advances the implications for practice. The authors use a field investigative approach to study, over time, the evolution of three industrial buyer–seller relationships in mature industrial markets. The relationships are characterized by various degrees of initial asymmetry and have evolved in dramatically different ways over time. Their findings suggest that weaker firms can structure and thrive in long-term relationships with powerful partners because initial asymmetries are subsequently redressed through the development of high levels of interpersonal trust across the dyad, which in turn leads to increased levels of interorganizational commitment.

This study investigates the comprehensive and multidimensional effects of quota (goal) frequency on sales force performance. The study provides a theory of salespeople’s behavior—aggregate effort and the product-type focus—in response to the temporal length of a sales quota cycle. The theory includes many realistic elements, such as salespeople’s multidimensional effort, heterogeneity in ability, product focus, and forward-looking behavior. We test the theory through a field experiment, varying the sales compensation structure of a major retail chain in Sweden. Consistent with the developed theory, shifting to a temporally frequent quota structure leads to an increase in sales performance for low-performing salespeople by preventing them from giving up in later periods within a quota-evaluation cycle, but to a decrease in sales performance for high-performing salespeople. With quotas set over short time horizons, the high-performing salespeople focus mainly on low-ticket products, resulting in a decrease in both sales volume and the sale of high-ticket products, thus reducing the firm’s profits. This paper was accepted by Eric Anderson, marketing.