Avinash Malshe

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).

Sales and marketing departments play a crucial role in revenue generation in business organizations. Given the interdependent nature of the strategic processes such as value creation, communication, and delivery that these functions are involved in, it is imperative for a firm’s success that the sales-marketing interface (henceforth interface) function smoothly. There has been a surge in literature on this interface recently and early work in this area suggests that in a large number of companies, these two functions share sub-optimal relationship (Carpenter 1992; Kotler, Rackham, and Krishnaswamy, 2006; Montgomery and Webster 1997).

A firm’s ability to understand the effects of its marketing resource deployments continues to be a major focus of organizations. In order to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing implementation, the ability to measure and track activities is vital. Marketing performance measurement systems provide the marketing function with the capability to measure the impact across a variety of marketing activities and to evaluate the performance of marketing activities vis a vis an ample set of metrics (O’Sullivan & Abela, 2007). However, a marketing performance measurement system is a resource of the firm. The resource-based view (RBV) suggests that the link between the firm’s resources and its performance must be understood within the organization’s structures and processes (Teece, Pisano & Shuen). Hence, the deployment and effectiveness of a marketing performance management system may not be universally equivocal; instead its effectiveness may be contingent on the strategic direction of the firm and its marketing strategy. Yet, research examining the moderating impact of marketing strategy on the link between the marketing performance management system and performance is relatively sparse. Our research intent is to provide greater learning by examining a series of strategic conditions on the marketing performance management to performance relationship. Strategies provide direction to the marketing function regarding the use of marketing resources (Slater & Olson, 2001), including how a firm chooses to “deploy marketing resources at its disposal to facilitate the achievement of competitive positional advantage(s) in the marketplace” (Varadarajan & Yadav, 2002, p. 299). We utilize the classification of four marketing strategy prototypes submitted by Slater and Olson (2001). We apply this understanding of marketing strategies and examine their contingent effects on the relationship between marketing performance management and its relationship to performance. Our study sample was comprised of key informants, which were marketing executives across an array of U.S. based businesses and industries. In terms of results, we found a series of significant moderating effects. The results find a number of positive moderating conditions for the relationship between marketing performance management and business unit performance. Specifically, our results reflect that a firm’s marketing strategies and its use of marketing performance measurement can be complementary and provide an opportunity to gain an advantage position in the marketplace (Homburg et al., 2000; Slater & Olson, 2000). Conversely, we find two instances, in which the configuration does not enhance the effects between marketing performance measurement and business unit performance. Our results should encourage managers to carefully consider the implementation of marketing performance measurement systems depending upon their marketing strategies.

This paper highlights the role of firm’s three “basic capabilities”—customer orientation, proactiveness, and mindfulness in determining its learning capacity—a “dynamic capability”, which in turn can help firms improve new products outcomes. The authors use data collected from manufacturing firms in the United States and test a model using structural equations. The results indicate that customer oriented firms that are proactive about identifying future opportunities and mindful of their current surroundings have greater learning capacity. Further, they show that firm’s learning capacity enhances new products outcomes such as creativity, timeliness and new product advantage.

Marketing planning is an important capability in that it helps firms to methodically organize the processes needed to develop marketing strategy and direct marketing activities (Lee et al. 2013). Slotegraff and Dickson (2004) consider marketing planning as an essential strategic routine that “can cultivate an organizational capability through the integration, combination, and reconfiguration of a firm’s resources” (p. 371). The stronger the marketing planning capability, the more the firm exhibits all-encompassing approach to strategic planning. We draw on this assertion to suggest that firms with stronger marketing planning capability are likely to develop marketing ambidexterity—namely the ability to improvise marketing strategies as well as the ability develop comprehensive marketing strategies (Slotegraaf and Dickson 2004).
Extant empirical studies examining marketing planning capability have used industrialized economies, such as the United States or Australia as research contexts (e.g. Slotegraaf and Dickson 2004; Taghian 2010). Since marketing planning capability serves as an important firm resource in delivering superior customer value, there is an increasing need to investigate this crucial strategic capability in emerging markets, especially since the emerging markets are experiencing astonishing growth rates and greater examinations of marketing phenomena are needed in non-western contexts (Burgess and Steenkamp 2006).
Against this backdrop, we conceived and empirically tested a model that linked the firm’s marketing planning capability to two critical mediating variables, that of marketing strategy comprehensiveness and marketing strategy improvisation, which ultimately led to firm performance. We empirically test of the relationships within our conceptual model by using dyadic data from senior marketing managers and senior-level executives in the firm. We examine this phenomenon in Saudi Arabia (SA). SA is an optimal research context since SA’s economy is the world’s 11the largest, and is a rapidly growing economy that plays a significant role within the Arab League (Mahajan 2013).
The results find that marketing planning capability has a significant effect on marketing strategy comprehensiveness. Marketing planning capability is also significantly related to improvisation. Our findings contribute to the marketing literature by examining the link between marketing planning capability and firm performance by better understanding the value of the mediating effects of the comprehensiveness of marketing strategies and marketing strategy improvisation.

This research focuses on small businesses (having fewer than 20 employees and generating less than $5M in annual sales) operating in communities with populations of less than 10,000 people. Networks or strategic alliances are anticipated to provide essential links to sources of capital, new employees, partners, and innovation in small or rural businesses across America. The goal of this research is to study the effects of networking on small business owners’ strategic planning, and to determine the effect or outcomes generated by networking on member businesses and on network continuance. Business types included both product and service-based firms predominately ‘homegrown’ in rural or small communities across the four midwest states of Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio.

Our paper contributes to the evolving marketing paradigm by focusing on consumers ’operant and operand resources. First we overview and define consumers’ resources. Next we depict how operant resources of customers and firms come together to co-create valuethrough patterns of experiences and meanings embedded in the cultural life-worlds of consumers. This analysis is then extended to illustrate the new sets of problems broughtinto relief by the interaction of consumer and firm operant resources. A research agendaflows from adopting a resource-centered perspective.