Helping teammates during new product selling : when does it pay off?

To sell new products firms increasingly rely on sales teams. Members of such teams have two potentially conflicting tasks: helping team colleagues and accomplishing high individual turnover. As a result, the challenge for salespeople is to conduct their helping in such a manner that it does not harm and even benefits their individual task accomplishment. So the question is under which conditions helping teammates pays off for the individual salesperson. The authors of this study address this issue and conduct an in-depth empirical study. The results of the empirical study show that helping teammates only leads to higher overall sales for new products if (1) salespeople combine it with proactive selling or if (2) team diversity in sales experience is high. Furthermore, the results reveal that team diversity in sales experience compensates for low levels of proactive selling.