Which B2B Thinker Are You (1).pdf (335.93 kB)
Which B2B thinker are you?
journal contribution
posted on 2021-09-08, 06:14 authored by Heinz HerrmannHeinz Herrmann, Sudhir Rana: 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.