Authors: Ivan Snehota; La Rocca Antonella
Those who take functional perspective on sales define the scope of the sales function as developing and managing customer relationships (Anderson & Narus 1998: Wotruba, 1996).Against this background our research question is: What is the significance of the sales function, in particular the task content and organisational setting, in developing the initial customer relationships in a newly emerging business venture? The question addressed in this paper is: what is the role of sales in developing the initial customer relationships of a new business venture, what are the critical tasks and how are these carried out? The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, we are set to identify the specific requirements on sales in such context: secondly, we are going to sketch a conceptual framework to guide further research.The paper is organized as follows. We start with reporting a case of development of three new business relationships in a B2B company focusing on the content of the ‘sales process’. In the section that follows conclusions are drawn regarding the content and organizational setting of the sales function in situations of new relationship development and, finally, presenting a rough conceptual framework we discuss implications for how the issues of the sales function can be addressed in future research Few would object to such a broad definition of the scope of the sales in a busin
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)