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Senior management is becoming increasingly convinced of what marketers have long advocated: staying close to customers in order to serve them well is a critical competitive advantage in a competitive marketplace. Companies are increasingly committing themselves to win and retain customers (Jackson, 1985a, 1985b). They have increased their commitment to relationship marketing through such organizational forms as national accounts and team selling approaches in order to analyze and service the needs of important customers and to provide a comprehensive, coordinated approach to meeting those needs over time (Barrett, 1986; Bertrand, 1987). Developing effective interaction within the salesforce and between the marketing and other functional departments in the company has consequently become a high priority issue as senior management attempts to operationalize the fundamental precepts of relationship marketing inherent in team and national account selling systems.
A major difficulty associated with development of relationship marketing oriented approaches, however, lies with the problem of effective program implementation. Two related issues in particular merit discussion.
The first implementation problem relates to the actual buyer/seller interface and, as a consequence, focusses on the interaction of the sales representative and the purchaser. A substantial amount of marketing research has been conducted in this area and those articles that are particularly germane will be discussed shortly.
The second problem of implementation is related to the difficulties of establishing an effective internal interface among all of the employees and functional departments in the vendor's organization so that one of the fundamental requirements of relationship marketing can be established. Specifically, relationship marketing requires that individual members of the salesforce work in concert with each other to meet customer needs and, of equal importance, that the marketing department in total effectively interacts with the other areas of the firm toward the same objective. Should this form of concerted interaction fail to be implemented, relationship marketing strategies, in all likelihood, will be seriously compromised from the outset.
It is this second implementation issue that is the focus of our research because successful achievement of a corporate-wide consensus within the vending organization, namely the value of relationship marketing goals is the logical precursor to attempting a close and long-lasting relationship with the customer.
Regrettably, there is little marketing research that deals directly with the measurement or...