How Does Selling Capability Impact Firm Value? The Moderating Roles of Relative Strategic Emphasis, Market Volatility, and Technological Volatility

Abstract

Firms develop and deploy selling capability to create and sustain a competitive advantage. Previous studies have focused predominantly on static, input-based selling capability, paying little attention to dynamic, efficiency-focused selling capability. This treatise reconceptualizes selling capability from a dynamic and efficiency (input–output) perspective and investigates the effect of selling capability on firm value with the contingent role of internal [i.e. relative strategic emphasis (SE)] and external (i.e. market volatility and technological volatility) factors. Using data from 341 US-based manufacturing and service firms over the period 2014–2020 and an endogeneity-robust dynamic estimation technique, the authors find that selling capability positively affects firm value, and firms with a relative SE on value appropriation (i.e. advertising) as opposed to value creation (i.e. R&D) reap more rewards from selling capability. That is, relative SE positively moderates the nexus between selling capability and firm value. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the interactive effect of selling capability and relative SE is weaker when an industry experiences higher market volatility but stronger when technological volatility is higher. Overall, this study demonstrates that a firm's selling capability should be managed dynamically in light of its (internal) relative SE and (external) environmental conditions. The results are robust to several additional sensitivity analyses.