The sales mandate: what needs clarifying before selling?
In high-value-added selling, salespeople often have to reconcile commercial ambitions with technical, contractual and operational constraints. The managerial question is specific: should their decision-making authority be better defined before they are asked to show more initiative?
What the literature establishes
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) distinguish two organisational difficulties: role ambiguity, when expectations or responsibilities are unclear, and role conflict, when demands are incompatible. Their work provides instruments for measuring these phenomena rather than a sales method. Applied to selling, this distinction helps prevent an ill-defined mandate from being mistaken for genuine freedom to act.
Ambiguity is more than an inconvenience
Travis C. Tubre and Judith M. Collins (2000, Journal of Management) examine the relationships between role ambiguity, role conflict and job performance in a meta-analysis. Role ambiguity is negatively associated with performance; the relationship involving role conflict is weaker. These findings suggest treating a lack of clear guidance separately from the coexistence of contradictory demands.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every sales interaction should be governed by a procedure. Yet the cited studies do not establish that adding more rules improves selling. Clarifying who can commit to a deadline, accept a modification or authorise an exception can still leave salespeople considerable discretion in managing the relationship. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These studies concern organisational roles and job performance, not a high-value-added sales protocol tested in Berne. The associations synthesised do not demonstrate that clarifying a mandate will, by itself, increase revenue. In practice, a written allocation of responsibilities may also have little effect if everyday instructions continue to contradict it.
A practical check in Berne
Within SHR’s « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, one possible exercise is to review requests for exceptions over four weeks in sales cases involving federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing in Berne. For each request, record whether the internal decision-making authority had been designated beforehand and retain a record of its decision, without replacing the procedures applicable within the client organisation. The indicator is the proportion of requests for which that authority was defined in advance, alongside the time taken to reach a decision. Repeating the measurement after clarifying mandates can verify a change in working practices, without treating it as proof of sales effectiveness. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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