Abstract

This study shows how entrepreneurial knowledge is accumulated and applied by women engaged in selling, by integrating selling as a concrete experience, comprising six distinct phases, into the Kolb experiential learning cycle. Utilising qualitative diary studies, 12 women direct sellers recorded diaries over a six-month period, resulting in over 70 distinct diary entries. These were analysed thematically to understand how the selling experience influenced the participants’ development of entrepreneurial skills. Specifically, a definition of interconnected selling (IS) as personal selling of products and/or services while being part of a peer support network enables us to capture the social dimension of learning, which is often ignored when using Kolb’s cycle. The findings from this study show that vicarious learning from peers enabled the women to improve their selling practices, while customer interactions necessitated the development of entrepreneurial skills like people management and innovation. The study thus situates IS as a concrete experience in the EL discourse and paves the way for the exploration of other entrepreneurial practices as concrete experiences which may lead to EL, especially in women who are thought to prefer confidence-building learning mechanisms.