Prelims

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ORGANIZING MARKETING AND SALES: MASTERING CONTEMPORARY B2B CHALLENGES

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ORGANIZING MARKETING AND SALES: MASTERING CONTEMPORARY B2B CHALLENGES

EDITED BY

PER ANDERSSON

BJÖRN AXELSSON

CHRISTOPHER ROSENQVIST

Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden

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United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78754-969-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78754-968-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78754-970-8 (Epub)

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About the Authors

Per Andersson is a Professor at the Institution for Marketing and Strategy, Stockholm School of Economics. His research projects have a focus on industry change and dynamics connected to changes in information and communication technologies (ICT). His recent research is focused on service innovation processes in media and ICT markets, as well as how companies in various industries manage digital transformation processes.

Björn Axelsson is a Professor Emeritus at Stockholm School of Economics. He holds a PhD from Uppsala University. His research areas are business-to-business marketing and purchasing management. During 2005–2009, he held the first Swedish chair in purchasing and supply management. His primary interests during later years have been various aspects of solution business, a phenomenon he studies from both sales and purchasing perspectives. He has also become increasingly involved in projects dealing with public procurement.

Christopher Rosenqvist is an Associate Professor and Lecturer at the Center for Digital Transformation and Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics and at SSE Institute for Research. His research and teaching is about how new technologies affect and change the ecosystem of actors in different industrial arenas and how these actors’ offerings to consumers continually require new and more complex forms and business models to create relevant, integrated, and simple solutions to the consumers.

Cecilia Cederlund is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research focuses on change processes in large, multinational, industrial firms from a dynamic, complexity perspective. Her research interests are in the area of value creation, creativity, strategic management, and brand orientation. Branding also forms the base of her experience as a practitioner. She has published in Industrial Marketing Management and the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, and preliminary results have been presented at conferences focusing on business-to-business marketing.

Daniel Grenblad joined the Institution for Marketing and Strategy, Stockholm School of Economics as PhD Student from a career in business. He has done research within the area of marketing with a focus on marketing reorganization processes. His research focuses on tensions in marketing reorganization processes in banks and how they are managed internally and in relation to customer.

Lei Huang is a PhD Student in marketing at Stockholm School of Economics. Her research interests include solution development and management, value proposition development, business model innovation, customer value creation processes in digital transformation.

Kristoffer Jönsson earned his Master of Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics and continued as a Research Assistant. He later took up a position in a consultancy firm specialized on pricing. He works nowadays as a financial controller at H&M.

Ebba Laurin got a first-class honors degree in 1997 in Management and Organization from Glasgow Business School. She worked with business development in startups in the 1990s. During the 2000s, she made an international career at Ericsson with roles that ranged from customization director in multimedia to solution innovation in the enterprise area. She earned a PhD in Business Administration in 2017 from Stockholm School of Economics with the dissertation “Box Paradox: How Key Account Management Contribute to Business Model innovation.” She has published in international books and in the journal Innovation Management & Technology.

Dariusz Osowski is an Assistant Professor at the Stockholm Business School at Stockholm University. He received a PhD from the Department of Business Studies at the Uppsala University in the area of sales management and IT and is associated with the Management and Information Technology Research School. He has working experience in sales management and consulting. His research interests resolve around organizational routines and utilization of recent technologies for revenue generation, such as application of cloud technology, artificial intelligence, or block-chain technologies in sales.

Min Tian is a PhD Candidate at Stockholm School of Economics. She received her Master’s Degree in Marketing from Stockholm University and continued as a research assistant. Her current research interest is concerned with solution processes, information system management, and customer relationship management.

Mats Vilgon has been working at SSE for more than 20 years teaching at the graduate and master’s levels and, mainly, at the executive programs in Stockholm and St Petersburg. He has published in journals such as European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Economic Psychology, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Customer Behavior, and Journal of Business Market Management.

Sarah Wikner earned her PhD at Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. The thesis is about value cocreation between suppliers and customers. Her interest lies in improving marketing and sales through processes, tools, and corporate strategy. She has been part of the research group Value-In-Sight at the marketing department of Stockholm School of Economics. She now combines teaching and consultancy work where she contributes to strategically develop supplier–customer relationships.

Lars-Johan Åge is an Associate Professor at Gavle University in Sweden. He earned his PhD at Stockholm School of Economics; it dealt with sales processes. He has previous experience as a sales manager. After his PhD, he has continued to do research which presently focuses on business negotiations.

Foreword

This book is the outcome of a number of PhD-theses and other research projects. It has been under way for several years and has served as a catalyst for knowledge generation within a research team of around 12 people at the Stockholm School of Economics. The leading theme of the research has been “value creation in business-to-business operations,” or Value in Sight (VIS), as we have named our group. When we had forged out a number of texts based on our research, we had around 70 percent of the chapters of the book. We as editors then took a different stance by asking ourselves what was missing in order to make this into a holistic book on organizing marketing and sales. We identified a number of themes that were important but not covered. The exercise resulted in the following step in the remaining 30 percent of the content (chapters).

Our ambition has been to arrive at a presentation that would capture contemporary challenges and thinking around them, specifically addressing sales. This means that we rely quite a lot on empirical findings, especially regarding what firms try to achieve and what seems to be problematic in making it happen. We have also been guided by two main ideas: (1) that sales and marketing are essentially about organizing and (2) that business firms are gradually moving toward the so-called solutions business. But it seems to be a tricky journey with a lot of challenges, not least regarding sales. Sales and marketing, nevertheless, need to be aligned when looking at solutions businesses. This could be considered a third main guiding idea. These background thoughts are more or less explicitly addressed in all chapters.

It is clear that the book is based on research and should be an interesting read for scholars in the field. But as it is rather close to “real-world” illustrations and problems, we think it should appeal to people in business too. We know that many of the challenges presented are deeply sensed problems also in practice. Many years of experience in executive training has taught us that most of the challenges managers perceive are related to organizational issues and are often internally oriented. When asking sales and marketing managers about what kind of challenges are on top of their minds and, thus, the ones they would like to explore in development projects, roughly four out of five tend to be about organizational challenges: How to coordinate our sales-force? How to connect sales and R&D? and so on. One challenge out of the four organizationally oriented tends to be outward-looking, specifically addressing challenges in managing customers and/or competitors. All the rest are primarily internally oriented. This is a strong indicator to us of the topical relevance of the book.

We also think of master-courses and similar contexts as potential target audiences. Much of the content presented in the book has contributed to our courses in the SSE Master in Management Programs. Some of it has also been utilized in the school’s Bachelor Programs, especially in courses addressing business-to-business marketing.

We as editors want to thank all our contributors and especially all members of the VIS group for their expertise and patience in allowing this process to take some time and also to willingly contribute and to adapt their texts step-by-step based on our criticisms. Several of the research projects underlying these texts have had financial support from the Torsten Söderberg Fund (Cederlund, Laurin, Huang, Tian, Åge) and also from the Research Foundations at the Handelsbanken (Grenblad, Jönsson, Vilgon, Wikner). We are thankful for that. Thanks also to Kalin Taylor who skillfully helped us correct the language. We also want to thank the publisher, Emerald Insight, for their acceptance of our manuscript and for their great work, including the comments by the two reviewers. We hope the reader will find this book an interesting and up-to-date read.

Stockholm, March 2018