Yashar Atefi
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Yashar Atefi is an associate professor of marketing and holds the Evelyn and Jay G. Piccinati Endowed Chair in the Department of Marketing. He has served as the founding director and the co-director of the Sales Leadership Center. Prior to Daniels, he was the research director of the Professional Sales Institute at Louisiana State University. Prior to LSU, he was deeply involved with the Sales Excellence Institute at the University of Houston, where he also received his PhD.
What do you study and why?
My research is generally in the area of sales and revenue management, focusing on various aspects of the sales funnel—from acquiring leads to after-sales operations. My interest lies in understanding and improving the effectiveness of sales organizations, including areas like compensation and incentives, sales force training, sales negotiations, sales technology and AI.
My broader research also explores strategies for integrating different functions within revenue operations to enhance overall efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, one of the projects I’m working on right now looks at the impact of the “Growth Department” as an emerging structure within organizations and in integrating the entire revenue operation. There’s this new emerging trend in organizations where you see a lot of titles like Chief Growth Officer, who works with marketing and sales, and sometimes those departments report to the Growth Department, and sometimes it’s vice versa. A lot of organizations have these departments now, so I’m asking: What do these departments actually do? There isn’t much research to inform what they actually do. So, we collected 800 job ads for growth positions at all different organizational levels and analyzed them. We also looked at startups and studied what happens to their fundraising when they hired a growth leader versus a marketing or sales leader. Overall, we found that growth initiatives departments unify sales, marketing, product, and even M&A initiatives to drive organizational growth more efficiently.
What are some of your recent or ongoing research projects?
One of my papers that was just recently accepted over the summer to be published in the Journal of Marketing (FT50; UTD24) looks at the idea of sales performance rankings as a way to motivate salespeople. We worked with a company in Denver to look at a range of hundreds of companies across various industries and thousands of salespeople to see what kind of information published with those performance rankings has an effect on motivation. For example, does it help if the rankings are anonymous or if individuals are identified? What about information about targets and quotas?
I’m also working on revisions for a paper that looks at sales turnover, particularly the turnover of high-performing salespeople who miss their quotas by small margins. We discovered that repeated near-misses significantly increase the likelihood of disengagement and quitting. This research includes field studies with multiple companies to understand the “Near Miss Effect.”
Lastly, I’m examining the use of AI at different stages of the sales funnel (pre-customer interaction, direct customer interaction and post-customer interaction) and its value from investors’ perspectives. I’m studying how AI startups get funded and the impact of AI on various stages of the sales process.
How do you involve students in your research?
I have papers on sales training, incentives, compensation, etc., which I bring into my Sales Management class. I’ve recently been discussing the paper I mentioned about sales performance rankings in class, and I regularly include my most up-to-date research in lectures during, say, Marketing Concepts or Introduction to Marketing. Then, of course, I teach an EPhD course in marketing, which is all research.
How would you like to see your work impact businesses and society at large?
A lot of my research is coming directly from conversations with sales leaders and marketing strategists, because I really want to study what companies are actually doing and see whether or not those business practices are effective. Part of this is just studying new emerging phenomenon, like the growth department study, or another study I’m doing with one of my students that explores this practice of fractional executives in sales and marketing. It’s a very applied approach to doing research, versus an inside-out way of identifying some idea and then going out and trying to sell it to companies. The research comes directly from what the companies are doing, and then studying the practices in detail to see the implications.