Abstract
Our special session combines four papers that offer fresh, new, directions in business-to-business (B2B) research. Our first paper, “Emotions in B2B Multi-Million Dollars Sales Proposals: A Qualitative Examination of the Buying Process in Large Value Key Account Sales,” focuses on the B2B buying process with large value, key accounts. The authors, Carolyn Curasi and Jim Boles, track the specific steps within the buying cycle (Curasi et al. 2018) and offer a modified framework of the B2B buying cycle, examining drivers of sales performance (Samli et al. 1988; Verbeke et al. 2011).
“Opportunistic Utilization and the Salesforce Potemkin Village: The Self-Destructive Cycle That Can Result from the Misuse of IT in Salesforce Management,” investigated and authored by Robert Mayberry, examines the interface between sales management, corporate analytics, and the behavior of the sales force within one large corporation. This research explores the intentional misuse of the Sales Force Automation (SFA) system among the sales force, with serious and far-reaching consequences.
In “Story Type, B2B Advertising, and Decisions Making,” Nwamaka Anaza, examines stories and their influence in organizational decision making, an area that has been largely overlooked in B2B research (e.g., Huang 2014). B2B firms are increasing their advertising budgets (eMarketer 2017) and are using stories as part of their internal organizational messaging, however, little empirical research exists that examines story-based advertising in organizational decision making.
Our special session is rounded out by Avinash Malshe’s paper, “Thinking Beyond the Sales-Marketing Interface,” which takes a novel look at what a successful sales process entails in our dynamic, fast-paced, and hypercompetitive business world (Hartman et al. 2018), and suggests that selling can no longer be viewed as a linear process (Dixon and Tanner 2012), but that instead, the sales process is supported by contributing processes often involving multiple individuals and parties within the buying and selling organizations (Bolander et al. 2015; Friend and Malshe 2016).