Sales Productivity and Employee Engagement: Evidence from Upselling in the Car Rental Industry∗

This research investigates whether or not employee engagement has an impact on upselling effectiveness in the car rental service industry, where upselling is a key performance metric for customer development. Our empirical strategy employs a series of simple empirical tests based on measures of engagement constructed using various sub-groups of employees and questions. The main results demonstrate that engagement by employees who actually interact with customers and focus about customer-centric issues have a markedly larger effect on sales productivity via upselling, as compared with the alternative engagement measures. Furthermore, we show that employee engagement has a greater impact on upselling effectiveness among transactions made by business and weekend users.