A Tremendous Recognition

A C. T. Bauer College of Business doctoral student’s dissertation research has been honored with awards in three of the most noteworthy national and international competitions for academic work in the field of marketing.

Arpit Agrawal, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Marketing & Entrepreneurship at Bauer College, is a winner of the 2024 Organizational Frontlines Symposium's Young Scholar Competition and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Doctoral Dissertation Early-Stage Research Grants competition, and was selected as runner-up for the 2024 AMA Sales SIG Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Award.

The INFORMS grant competition names six winners worldwide, and three in the United States.

Agrawal’s research, “Almost There, But Not Quite: How Marginally Missing Sales Quotas Increase Turnover,” provides a new insight into the relationship between salesperson performance and their quitting behavior.

“The conventional thinking regarding this relationship is that lower performance increases the probability of quitting,” Agrawal said. “We have a nuanced finding that when salespeople miss their quota by a small margin, their probability of quitting increases. We call this 'near miss effect.' Even though a near miss (missing out on target/quota by a small margin) is above average performance, salespeople are likely to quit when they repeatedly near miss their quotas.”

Agrawal’s co-authors on the research include his doctoral advisor, Professor Michael Ahearne, who holds the C. T. Bauer Chair in Marketing and serves as Research Director of the Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute, Associate Professor of Marketing Johannes Habel, and Yashar Atefi of the University of Denver.

Before joining the Bauer College doctoral program, Agrawal worked in the e-commerce sector in India, managing growth initiatives.