Which B2B thinker are you?

Heinz Herrmann and Sudhir Rana

International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 2020, vol. 21, issue 1, 45-62

Abstract: Despite its substantial economic contribution, the field of business-to-business (B2B) sales has been underrepresented in the academic sales and marketing (S%M) literature. Much of the published literature covers traditional, transaction-marketing-related topics. To identify recent trends in thinking, this descriptive study evaluated 201 contributions to the B2B S%M domain. A factor analysis revealed three dimensions across emerging themes: relationship selling, management of sales and tactical selling. The factor scores were then clustered into four schools of thought: transactionists, blue suiters, servants and partners. Such tandem clustering provides a generalisable approach for qualitatively exploring emerging themes through an iterative literature search and then quantitatively analysing theme patterns across authors to describe schools of thought in a taxonomy.

Keywords: personal selling; B2B marketing; B2B sales; tandem clustering. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijicbm:v:21:y:2020:i:1:p:45-62

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