The Embedded Salesforce: Connecting Buying and Selling Organizations

Dominique Rouzies (1) , Kevin Bradford (2) , Steven Brown (3) , Shankar Ganesan (4) , Gary Hunter (5) , Vincent Onyemah (6) , Robert Palmatier (7) , Rosann Spiro (8) , Harish Sujan (9) , Barton A. Weitz (10)

1 GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC
2 Department of Marketing, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame
3 University of Houston
4 Department of Marketing
5 Weatherland School of Management
6 marketing department
7 University of Washington [Seattle]
8 Kelley School of Business
9 Tulane University
10 Department of Marketing

Business-to-business firms are increasingly focusing on building long-term partnering relationships with key customers. Salespeople are often responsible for managing these relationships. To be effective as relationship managers, salespeople need to be embedded in both their firm's and customers' organizations. They need to have extensive knowledge of their customers' business and also know and be able to leverage their firm's resources to develop offerings tailored to their customers' needs. Their companies and sales managers need to use different approaches to manage and support salespeople in this new role. In this paper, we examine some issues affecting the interfaces between elements of the embedded sales force and suggest some directions for future research and methods for examining these issues.

Keywords: Sales force; Relationship; Embedded

Dominique Rouzies, Kevin Bradford, Steven Brown, Shankar Ganesan, Gary Hunter, et al.. The Embedded Salesforce: Connecting Buying and Selling Organizations. Marketing Letters, 2010, 21 (3), pp.239-253. ⟨10.1007/s11002-010-9106-1⟩. ⟨hal-00537094⟩