Title: Which B2B thinker are you?

Authors: Heinz Herrmann; Sudhir Rana

Addresses: Australian Graduate School of Leadership at Torrens University Australia, 88 Phillip St, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia ' Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB), New Delhi, India

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.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICBM.2020.109336

International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 2020 Vol.21 No.1, pp.45 - 62

Received: 26 Jun 2019
Accepted: 01 Aug 2019

Published online: 03 Sep 2020 *

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