Rate My Professor Bitty Balducci

Bitty Balducci serves as an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Marketing and International Business within Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, Pullman campus. She holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Missouri, where she received the University of Missouri Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award in 2018. Prior to her academic career, Balducci accumulated professional experience in development and sales roles. Her research interests center on marketing strategy, particularly examining how sales interactions dynamically unfold and impact performance. Balducci leverages unstructured data from acoustic and textual sources, applying advanced techniques such as text mining, natural language processing, and acoustic analysis to study sales dyads. This approach seeks to equip sales practitioners with evidence-based insights to enhance training programs, management practices, and performance evaluations. She is a key contributor to WSU’s Center for Professional Sales as Pullman Faculty, helping expand the program across campuses, including growth in enrollment from 30 to over 200 students since fall 2020, and facilitating hands-on experiences like speed selling competitions and simulated sales calls.

Balducci’s scholarly contributions include highly cited works such as “Unstructured Data in Marketing” (2018, 498 citations), “Visualization Ability and the Elaborations that Sustain Product Desire” (2021, co-authored with M.L. Richins), “Predicting Conversation Outcomes Using Multimodal Transformer” (2021), “Deep Formality: Sentence Formality Prediction with Deep Learning” (2022), and “Psychological Reactance Among B2C Sales Prospects” (2025, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, co-authored with Minjoo Kim), which demonstrates that customers exhibit greater resistance to sales pitches in private settings due to psychological reactance, mitigated by increased physical distance. Additional publications cover topics like language model understanding of politeness (2023), voice in customer loyalty research (2022), and communication effectiveness (2018). Beyond research, she has engaged in international teaching, delivering sales seminars and role-playing workshops on business transactions to students at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu in Romania during a 2023 study abroad trip, fostering collaborations for research data access. Balducci has served as hiring committee chair and promotes sales education through events inspiring women in sales and professional development clubs open to all majors.