Which B2B thinker are you?

: 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.