Training
The use of on-the-job training as a method of training also seems to better meet the needs of services salespeople. This may be driven by the heterogeneity inherent in the service product. Since each product is unique for the customer, the approach of learning while actually doing may help prepare the salesperson for more situations than a classroom setting would permit. This would fit within the conceptual framework of Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan ( 1986) who assert that by increasing the richness and interconnections of the salesperson's knowledge structure, more effective sales presentations can be developed.
An interesting contradiction in these findings is that even though services salespeople found on-the-job training to be the most useful of the training methods, the location of their training was more likely to occur at the company offices. Taken together with the previous finding, this implies that the centralized location for training may not be meeting the training needs and more training should be undertaken in decentralized locations. Also, the results suggest that sales managers should assume a more active role in the training process for services.