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The embedded sales force: Connecting buying and selling organizations

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Abstract

Business-to-business firms are increasingly focusing on building long-term partnering relationships with key customers. Salespeople are often responsible for managing these relationships. To be effective as relationship managers, salespeople need to be embedded in both their firm’s and customers’ organizations. They need to have extensive knowledge of their customers’ business and also know and be able to leverage their firm’s resources to develop offerings tailored to their customers’ needs. Their companies and sales managers need to use different approaches to manage and support salespeople in this new role. In this paper, we examine some issues affecting the interfaces between elements of the embedded sales force and suggest some directions for future research and methods for examining these issues.

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Notes

  1. We recognized that firms have a portfolio of partnering and transactional relationship customers. While transactional relationships may dominate a firm’s portfolio, we focus this paper on the relational exchanges because they are under researched and typically offer the most opportunities for gaining competitive advantage.

  2. In the sales research literature, these relationship managers may be referred to as key account manager (KAM) and national account managers (NAM). However, the responsibilities of KAMs and NAMs can in some situations be restricted to coordinating the activities of salespeople calling on a customer with multiple locations rather than developing a strategic relationship with a customer (Workman et al. 2003). Most of the KAM research focuses on the responsibilities of KAMs, not on the skills and support they need to be effective.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Kevin Bradford

  2. University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Steven Brown

  3. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Shankar Ganesan

  4. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

    Gary Hunter

  5. Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA

    Vincent Onyemah

  6. University of Washington Business School, Seattle, WA, USA

    Robert Palmatier

  7. HEC School of Management—Paris, Paris, France

    Dominique Rouziès

  8. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Rosann Spiro

  9. Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Harish Sujan

  10. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Barton Weitz

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  1. Kevin Bradford
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  2. Steven Brown
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  9. Harish Sujan
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  10. Barton Weitz
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Correspondence to Barton Weitz.

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Bradford, K., Brown, S., Ganesan, S. et al. The embedded sales force: Connecting buying and selling organizations. Mark Lett 21, 239–253 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-010-9106-1

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