The Partnering Role of Salespeople in a Business-to-Business Setting

ABSTRACT

The salesforce plays a crucial boundary-spanning role between an organisation and its customers. Recently, Weitz and Bradford (1999) have argued that the sales function needs to take a far greater role in forming relationships with customers than it has done in the past. This will have implications for the way organisations manage their salesforce. This research seeks to examine changes in the role of sales in a business-to-business setting. Based upon in-depth interviews this research finds support for the requirement that salespeople need to form “partnerships” with customers. Organisational support for salespeople consisted of using virtual teams and a customer focused culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationship selling
• business-to-business
• case studies
• organizational culture