Contextual Influences and the Adoption and Practice of Relationship Selling in a Business-to-business Setting: An Exploratory Study

By M. Beverland. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2001

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, a number of authors have argued in favour of a relationship approach to selling and sales management. Despite this call, there has been little in the way of research to identify the impact of adopting relationship selling at an organizational and tactical level. Based upon multiple in-depth interviews with experienced salespeople, we propose the conditions under which relationship selling is appropriate, and argue that relationships with customers evolve through a two-stage process that involves balancing short-term performance based behaviors with long-term relationship building behaviors. Findings cause us to argue that organizations adopting a relationship approach to selling require flatter organizational structures and need to foster more flexible organizational cultures.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b4f1158998ede66e21b2335a07023704af91f95

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Simon Bell
2. B. Lukas
3. Andreas B. Eisingerich
4. L. Bove
5. I. Karpen

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Andreas B. Eisingerich
2. Simon Bell
3. B. Lukas
4. L. Bove
5. I. Karpen

In Strategy and Management

1. Simon Bell
2. B. Lukas
3. Andreas B. Eisingerich
4. L. Bove
5. I. Karpen

Citations in the corpus

• The paradox of customer education: Customer expertise and loyalty in the financial services industry (2007, background): “Client education is consistent with notions of relationship selling (Weitz and Bradford, 1999) where the sales process is more about partnership building with customers than the “hard sell” (Beverland, 2001).”
• Linking Service-Dominant Logic and Strategic Business Practice (2012, methodology): “Salespeople accordingly adopt education-oriented sales approaches, similar to notions of relationship selling (e.g., Beverland 2001; Weitz and Bradford 1999).”