Content area
Full text
The authors examine how the practice of personal selling and sales management is changing as a result of the increased attention on long-term, buyer-seller relationships and identify some implications of these changes. Changes in the traditional personal selling and sales management activities are needed to support the emergence of the partnering role for salespeople. For salespeople in the partnering role, the personal selling shifts from a focus on influencing buyer behavior to managing the conflict inherent in buyer-seller relationships. The emphasis on building relationships rather than making short-term sales and the use of sales teams dictates changes in the way firms select, train, evaluate, and compensate salespeople and members of sales teams. In this article, the authors have suggested some issues concerning the emerging partnering role for salespeople that deserve the attention of scholars inter ested in personal selling and sales management research.
Firms are focusing considerable attention on building sustainable, competitive advantages by developing and maintaining close, cooperative relationships with a limited set of suppliers, customers, and channel members. Through these relationships, firms create value by differentiating their offering and/or lowering their costs (Berling 1993; Han, Wilson, and Dant 1993; Kalwani and Narayandas 1995; Krapfel, Salmond, and Spekman 1991).
The attractiveness of this approach for building competitive advantage has led many marketing scholars to suggest that relationship marketing-the focus of marketing activities on establishing, developing, and maintaining cooperative, long-term relationships-is the new marketing paradigm (Gummesson 1998; Hunt and Morgan 1994; Kotler 1991; McKenna 1991; Parvatiyar and Sheth 1994; Webster 1992).
The term relationship marketing is applied to a number of different marketing activities ranging from consumer frequency marketing programs to selling activities directed toward building partnerships with key businessto-business customers. This article explores the implications of the latter aspect of relationship marketing for personal selling and sales force management practice and research.
Salespeople play a key role in the formation of longterm buyer-seller relationships. As the primary link between the buying and selling firms, they have considerable influence on the buyer's perceptions of the seller's reliability and the value of the seller's services and consequently the buyer's interest in continuing the relationship (Biong and Selnes 1996). Buyers often have greater loyalty to salespeople than they have to the firms employing the salespeople (Anderson...