The paper discusses the transformations in selling and sales management due to globalization, technology, and changing buyer behavior, highlighting the shift from transactional to strategic sales roles. Based on interviews with 66 experts, it emphasizes the need for sales organizations to adapt their strategies and structures to remain competitive. The authors call for further research to explore the competencies required for sales professionals in this evolving landscape.

1. The 9th Sales Management Research Conference, Paris 5th May 2011
Selling in the 21st century: mapping the transformations of selling
and sales management
Dr. Régis Lemmens
Sales Competence Centre
TiasNimbas Business School
Tilburg University
r.h.l.lemmens@tiasnimbas.edu
Dr. Javier Marcos-Cuevas*
Centre for Strategic Marketing and Sales
Cranfield School of Management
College Road, Cranfield, Bedford MK43 0AL, UK
javier.marcos@cranfield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1234 752211
Professor Lynette Ryals
Centre for Strategic Marketing and Sales
Cranfield School of Management
College Road, Cranfield, Bedford MK43 0AL, UK
lynette.ryals@cranfield.ac.uk
*Corresponding author
1

2. Selling in the 21st century: mapping the transformations of selling
and sales management
Abstract
Over the last decades, the changing role of the sales function has attracted a rich debate
within academic and practitioner circles. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the
ongoing dialogue about how sales organizations are changing and the future direction of
selling and sales management research and practice. Based on a set of sixty six
interviews with thought leaders from academia, sales consultancy and industry across
the US, UK and central Europe we argue that globalization, technology, changes in
buying behaviour and unprecedented levels of external and internal pressures are
forcing sales organizations to revisit sales strategies, structures and practices in a
fundamental way. We claim that sales has been polarized between transactional and
strategic, having profound effects into the role and profile of the future sales
professional. In the paper the challenge of reconciling and orchestrating disparate sales
strategies is discussed. It so doing, it is argued that companies need to consider the
ambidextrous sales organizations. The article concludes with an identification of areas
for future research with high potential impact in developing sales organizations.
1. Introduction: Research on the changing nature of selling and sales
management
Sales has been recognized as an important board room topic for more than fifteen years
(Shapiro, Slywotsky et al, 1994), although it is also said that many sales organizations –
and, hence, their sales people - are still focused on the transactional (Piercy 2006) and
operating under management paradigms that may be outdated. In this paper we argue
that fundamental transformations in the sales environment (Jones, Brown, et al. 2005)
are posing critical challenges that sales organizations need to address. Markets have
become more global and the degree of connectedness across different economic areas is
increasing dramatically (Honeycutt 2002). Technologies are facilitating new ways of
working and opening up new challenges for sales professionals. Business relations are
increasingly transcending relational approaches, and adopting new ways to co-create
value (Lusch, Vargo et al. 2010). The creation of value increasingly rests on the ability
to engage in deeper customer relationships and in understanding the context in which
products and services are used (Ford 2010).
Changes in the market have gradually triggered the evolution of the sales profession
from predictable and structured set of activities (see Moncrief, 1986) to a complex and
dynamic relationship manager role (Montcrief, 2005, 2006; Davies, Ryals, et al. 2009).
This means that classic activities of selling primarily focused on the product or the
service, have evolved towards consultative selling roles, focused on the customer
business and on adding value beyond the product or service. However, despite a wide
agreement within the academic community about the need for new mechanisms to add
value, less is known about the personal qualities that underpin value-creating skills in
sales people (Flaherty & Pappas, 2008; Plouffe and Barclay, 2007; Tanner, Fournier et.
al, 2008). Selling skills have been extensively studied in practitioner and academic
literature covering a wide spectrum of aspects from self-knowledge (Frayne and
Geringer 2000), cognition (Bonney and Williams, 2009), social skills (Merrill & Reid,
1981), and the ability to conduct in-depth exploration of the customer (Rackham 1988).
2

3. Whether the set of skills of today, will still be relevant in the future and in new markets
is a question that requires further study.
For over a decade, there has been much interest in mapping the transformations of sales
organizations to identify research in sales and sales management with higher potential
relevance for practice. Arguably, the first such effort was the Faculty Consortium on
Professional Selling and Sales Management meeting of the American Marketing
Association (AMA). In July 1999, the consortium met with a goal of building an
agenda for sales research for the next decade (Marshall and Michaels 2001). Subsequent
to the AMA symposium, a number of contributions have appeared in academic sales
and sales management journals identifying key opportunities to move the field of sales
and sales management research forward.
Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales
Management in 2005 (JPSSM, vol. 25, No. 2), a special issue on Sales and Sales
Management research was edited. Overall, contributions to the special issue delineated
profound changes in the environment that were affecting selling and sales management
over the last few years (Brown, Jones, et al 2005 – the changing env). In particular,
increased customer demands, more intense competition, fast paced technological
developments and ethical and legal regulations are all having important implications for
selling and sales management. Table 1 summarises the themes reported in four seminal
papers, addressing research in sales and sales management over the last decade.
Sales Research Priorities Marshall Leigh & Jones, Robertson,
and Marshall, Brown et Dixon, et
Michaels, 2001 al, 2005 al, 2006
2001
 Deciphering the transactional-consultative-relationship 
selling paradigms
 Identifying, developing and embedding customer value 
propositions
 Devising multi-channel and partnership strategies 
 Designing incentive schemes  
 The impact of technology, its degree of adoption in sales and   
information intensity
 Sales force configuration and organization   
 Identifying customer segments and resourcing segmentation 
processes
 Market adaptability; conceptual development and empirical 
testing of customer/market oriented cultures
 Sales recruitment, training and development and key  
attributes of sales professionals
 Customer relationship management and sales force  
automation
 Mapping emerging customer demands and expectations 
 Cultural awareness in selling and managing customers 
 Development and implementation of sales strategies 
 Coping with compliance, regulation and ethics 
 Managing sales performance 
 Leading sales forces and developing sales teams 
 Widening the scope of sales research into the sales function  
Table 1. Summary of themes addressed in key sales research agenda papers
There is currently still much interest in sales research, and valuable contributions are
published to delineate important research areas for research and practice (Geiger &
Guenzi, 2009).
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4. Following, a brief review of the key trends and changes in sales and sales management
is presented. The authors then report details of how the study was conducted and the
nature of the organizations and individuals behind the data set. Key findings are
reported, followed by a discussion and conclusion on implications for practice and areas
for future research.
2. Transformations in markets and the environment
Globalization of markets and the economy
The business landscape in most sectors and across different economies has dramatically
changed as a result of higher degrees of market liberalization in some sectors, and
higher levels of regulation in others. Large-scale mergers and acquisitions and a
renewed effort, towards international expansion have resulted in higher levels of
concentration in many sectors, re-shaping the competitive arena. Thus, traditional sales
territories are losing relevance that is being gained by regional and global customers,
implying more strategic customer management roles may be needed in sales
organizations. Arguably, the concentration of key players in many industries is also
influenced by new approaches adopted by purchasing organizations.
Business purchasing behaviours
In industrial markets, most sectors have experienced a shift in the way customers, and
particularly their purchasing organizations, treat their suppliers. Fewer, more
sophisticated customers have become more powerful and are seeking to achieve savings
and gain value by adopting supplier segmentation and other procurement strategies.
This has often resulted in reductions of suppliers of up to 40–90% (Ulaga & Eggert,
2006). Procurement has become a strategic function increasingly linked to the
customer‟s business plan with responsibility for realizing higher profit margins,
containing costs and contributing to superior shareholder value (Janda and Seshadri,
2001). Increasingly, professional purchasing managers use complex sourcing metrics to
select the “right” suppliers, and dictating the terms on how they want to be supplied (De
Boer, Labro and Morlacci 2001; Talluri and Narasimhan 2004). Overall, buyers are
demanding more value, not just from the product or service but from the relationship
and want to access specialized supplier capabilities in the best possible terms and
conditions.
The migration of value generation, hitherto embedded in the product or service, towards
a situation where value is created “in-use” (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) poses significant
challenges to both customer and suppliers organizations. The latter, need to think how
sales people can add value beyond the core offering; for the former, how to establish
relationships that will enable the customer to extract maximum value from product-
service offerings. How sales professionals can both meet the expectations of more
demanding customers and at the same time contribute to the growth of their business
sustainably, remains an open one.
Information and communication technologies
Over the last few decades, sales organizations have been subject to changes triggered by
unprecedented developments in information and communication technologies.
Tecnology is facilitating new ways of working and opening up new challenges for sales
professionals. Traditionally, field sales professionals played an important role in
informing the customer about the features and advantages of a product or service.
4

5. Customers now retrieve readily-available information via the internet (Sheth and
Sharma, 2008). As a result, tasks such as retrieving information may be better carried
out using the internet, thus questioning the future of the traditional dimension of
information provision of sales people. Similarly, information systems are providing
new opportunities to store, synthesise and analyse customer information in
unprecedented ways. Thus, customer insights are becoming an organizational capability
with CRM applications having grown significantly in importance (Tanner, Fournier et
al. 2005; Arnett and Badrinarayanan, 2005)
Technology has accelerated the evolution of the sales process, which is much less about
selling a product by informing about its attributes and much more about co-creating
value through relationships at the point of use or application (Vargo and Lusch, 2008).
Thus, essential information to manage sales processes is no longer generated by
marketing functions, but also by sales who are increasingly playing a knowledge broker
role, gathering customer insights that can be input into market intelligence and the CRM
systems we referred to above.
Advances in technology are not only facilitating customer interactions but also enabling
supplier organizations to have a better understanding of their cost structures and
calculate the profitability of their customers. Thus, marketing and sales investments in
selected customers, segments and channels is increasingly being subject to more
scrutiny and requiring more justification (Sheth and Sharma 2008).
The internet has opened new possibilities to provide services to customer less
expensively over the internet reducing the need of the face to face sales interactions.
Technology has enabled many sales organizations to consider a reduction in the size of
field sales forces in some sectors. It has also challenged sales leaders to think about
where sales organizations should focus and about alternative mechanisms by which
sales can add value. As a result, an increasing polarization between transactional and
consultative selling is emerging (Rackham and DeVicentis, 1999).
Overall, faster and more profound changes in the market place, more demanding
customers, and more sophisticated technology-enabled customer interactions is
questioning traditional conceptions of selling and posing significant challenges to sales
leaders in designing and managing sales organizations.
In table 1, the key emerging themes in sales and sales management are identified.
However, much of the debate about the evolution of selling and sales management is
conceptual. Furthermore, the call for brining the academic research in selling and sales
management more closely in line with practice (Jones, Brown et al, 2005, p. 106). Thus
the authors embarked into an exploratory study that interviewed thought leaders in
sales. The methods adopted for data collection and analysis are presented next.
3. Approach and methods
The overall aim of this study is to explore how the sales role is changing in the 21st
century and to examine the consequences of these changes for the sales organization
and for the practice of selling.
In order to gain a wide and rich perspective of the changes faced by sales organizations,
the research team interviewed 66 senior sales executives from industry, academia, sales
consultancy firms and representatives from sales associations across the US, UK and
central Europe. Industry practitioners are key informants to provide insightful insider
5

6. perspectives (Hammersley & Atkinson 1995), whilst academics are often up to date on
current debates and topical issues affecting the world of sales (e.g. Robertson, Dixon, et
al. 2006; Piercy & Lane 2005; Leigh & Marshall 2001). In turn, industry associations
and consultants are a source of valuable ideas and practices for the sales profession
(Rackham & DeVincentis, 1999) and consultants in particular, are key players in the
management knowledge market (Kipping & Engwall 2002)
Several criteria were taken into account to select the individuals from companies to
participate in the study. Interviewees had to have relevant sales experience of at least
15 years. Senior executives, typically a Sales Director, Divisional Sales Director or
Sales Vice President, were targeted for interview. In the case of consultants, they were
partners or senior consultants in international firms specialising in sales performance
development. Academics with an extensive track record in research, publishing, and
lecturing internationally were also interviewed.
A total of 37 organizations participated in the study where 25 were all major
corporations (FTSE 350 or equivalent), with a field sales force of minimum 100 people,
operating in business to business contexts. The rest were 8 were academic institutions
and 4 international sales consultancy firms and sales professional associations (see table
2). In addition, sectors where well documented transformations have occurred were
targeted to conduct the study. For instance, the pharmaceutical sector was particularly
relevant to illustrate the profound changes this industry is experiencing as a result of
regulation in health care. Information systems and engineering solutions are appropriate
contexts to illustrate the challenges of complex selling; fast moving consumer goods
(FMCG) companies were selected to gain insights from a key sector in developed
economies, often highly concentrated and in many instances strongly driven by price.
Professional and financial services served to provide evidence of sales transformations
in contexts where solution and relationship selling are perceived to be critical.
Sectors Number of companies
IT Services 4
Telecom 1
Consulting and Professional Services 2
Financial services 9
Pharmaceuticals 2
FMCG 2
Engineering 1
Industrial and technical products 3
Energy 1
Academia 8
Sales Consultancies 4
Table 2. Summary of participant organizations
The interviews lasted an average of 70 minutes. All interviews were conducted face to
face, which enabled a richer interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee
(Shuy 2001). In all cases, the aims of the study were re-stated at the beginning of the
interview and the voluntary participation in the study emphasised. Interviewees were
informed that they were not obliged to answer a question if they did not wish to do so.
No interviewee declined to answer any of the questions posed. Permission was asked to
record the interview and all interviewees gave their consent.
Interviews allowed the research team to ask questions to address changes in sales and
drivers of these changes, sales management processes, the role of the sales professionals
and associated competences. A semi-structured approach was employed, allowing the
researcher to explore the interviewees‟ views and experiences in more depth, and to
6

7. allow for other lines of enquiry to be pursued according to the circumstances (Kvale,
1996). „Why‟-type questions were avoided as much as possible as they can trigger
defensiveness (Becker, 1998). An interview protocol was devised and was used
consistently across all interviews. Over the course of conducting the interviews, the
research team perceived a great degree of openness and confidence in those
interviewed. This is consistent with some of the reported advantages of this method of
data collection. People tend to accept interviews readily as they often like talking about
their work (King, 2004).
In analysing the data, special emphasis was placed on employing a systematic method to
make inferences from the text. This was accomplished through coding, where themes
emerging from the data were identified and analysed consistently (Blaikie, 2000). A
first set of 21 interviews were fully transcribed, and imported into the qualitative
analysis package Nvivo (Gibbs, 2002). The use of software facilitates an audit trail of
the analysis and adds reliability and consistency to the process (Lincoln and Guba,
2000).
An inductive content analysis approach (Patton, 2002) was adopted whereby themes
were allowed to emerge without pre-imposing a coding structure. Portions of interview
text identified as representing relevant concepts are coded and labelled, and often kept
as „free nodes‟, that is, separated from any emerging conceptual structure or hierarchy.
Through an iterative process, emerging themes are tentatively organised into higher
order categories. As new text is coded, earlier categories are removed, revised, retained,
and constantly developed into clustered themes. Through an iterative process, emerging
themes were continuously organised into higher order categories, which were
subsequently further grouped into dimensions and further clustered in high level themes.
Two independent researchers reviewed the coding structure in order to enhance its
reliability. Comments were sought to detect instances of inconsistency and where
found, they were corrected. Both researchers agreed the coding structure was well-
founded, logical and suitable for the aims of this study. This procedure, although it
cannot be considered a systematic assessment of inter-coder reliability (Neuendorf,
2002), is thought to have added a reasonable amount of rigour to the coding process. In
addition, results were fed back in a workshop to a group of sales executives whose
companies had participated in the study. Overall, delegates felt the results were
plausible and a fair representation of the views they had expressed in the interviews.
4. Results
After the coding and the informants‟ validation of findings process described above the
research team was able to synthesize five core themes that represent the fundamental
challenges sales organizations are addressing or will be in the near future.
The first category refers how customer purchasing behaviour has changed and the extent
to which demands from customers have increased over the years across most business-
to-business sectors. The second category refers to new trends in creating and delivering
value propositions. Third the re-definition of customer interactions and how the sales
relationships are changing. Fourth, our data suggested the emergence of a new role for
sales, and fifth associated with this, a set of new he new key capabilities for future sales
professionals (see table 3).
Key themes
Changes in customer purchasing behaviour
Identifying and co-creating customer value
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8. Key themes
Re-definition of customer interactions
Emergence of a new role for sales professionals
New capabilities for the future sales professionals
Table 3. Key themes emerging from the literature
Changes in customer professional buying behaviour
A recurring theme across our interviews was the increasing power of buyers and
demands from suppliers. Our respondents outlined a number of factors they believed
that underpin the stronger position of the procurement function in many sectors. First,
the knowledge economy has brought about more transparency and higher levels of
information of products and services that buyers use to their advantage. Available
offerings in the market place, their similarities and differences and even feedback from
current or past customers are now easy to access and publicly available on the internet.
Second, higher levels of buying power have resulted from larger, more global
customers, as a result of mergers and acquisitions and international expansion of key
players in many sectors. Fewer customers concentrate higher levels of sales volumes,
giving them an opportunity to more strongly influence terms and conditions.
The result of a more powerful position means they can demand more. And this is also
the result of the customer organization asking the procurement position to add more
value, to be more strategic, and overall, to achieve higher reductions in cost. A renewed
focus on ROI is driving companies to demand from their suppliers compelling and
measurable evidence of the value the supplier is generating for the customer business.
Corporate procurement has become a recognized function across businesses and their
strategic role within the firm more widely acknowledged. This means more buyers are
being asked to achieve and justify strategic contributions.
Our data showed that the adoption of different purchasing approaches depending on the
supplier and product purchased, have changed dramatically over the last two decades. In
addition, the notion of value creation is being widened, particular in a serviticized and
knowledge-driven economy. The customer now has to be deeply involved in the
creation of value. Overall, many organizations we interviewed responded to this need
by providing opportunities for joint collaboration and innovation or by adopting
partnering approaches to offer superior solutions. This was recognised to be the trend
with strategic customers. As the Senior Vice president sales of a global FMCG
company described, professional buyer behaviour “it’s changed dramatically. It used to
be you went in once a week, you sold the deal, here’s how much money I have, here’s
what I want you to do for it, yes or no, those days are gone, now you don’t sell weekly
deals anymore, you’re selling a joint business plan, annually or quarterly and there’s a
lot more negotiation because your negotiating with different assets”.
Identifying and co-creating customer value
Thus, a key emerging theme in our data was the need for identifying and co-creating
value for the customer. In so doing, a number of informants reported how their sales
effort was focused in offering customers solutions to reduce or optimize operating costs.
The outsourcing and externalization of non core activities for the customer is an
example of how suppliers are adding value to the customer‟s business by optimizing
costs. Alternative to cost optimization, companies reported how their approach to create
value had transcended transactional elements. As one of our interviewees of technical
products recognized, “as I said we don’t define sales, it’s called customer business
development because that’s the way we think of it, it’s not the transaction, we no longer
8

9. think of it as the sell, we think of it as creating a joint business plan with the that will
ultimately deliver joint value, value for the customer, value for us and we define value
in the broadest sense”. This value creation approach required higher levels of
engagement with the customer, an in-depth understanding of their operations, as well as
insights about current and potential future sources of income. Occasionally, suppliers
recognized that to add value they had to fully understand and even challenge the
customer‟s business model.
The interviews revealed a number of practices that suppliers undertake in order to
identify and create mechanisms to add value. Customer intimacy workshops were set
up to find ways to improve customer service. Joint customer-supplier activities such as
innovation meetings were organized to create new value propositions or enhance
existing ones. These practices were underpinned by a co-creation approach, i.e. value is
created in the customer-supplier conjuncture rather than in a traditional way where the
customer specifies the „value‟ they want and the supplier delivers that „value‟ according
to specification. This raised a number of new challenges to suppliers and customers
alike.
A first challenge is that organizations require higher levels of collaboration and
engagement to effectively manage the co-creation approach. In some occasions,
pressures to reduce costs and customers‟ sole emphasis on price reduction undermined
the potential benefits of the co-creation approach. Interviewees recognised the co-
creation model was not appropriate for achieving short-term gains and in purely
transactional relationships.
A second issue, as one organization reported, had to do with the management of
expectations from customers. The absence of formal agreements on the role of all
parties involved in the co-creation process led to lack of clarity of ownership in the
products and processes, which had a negative impact on some of their customers. On
the other hand, interviewees acknowledge that the ability to co-create new products with
customers can be used to enhance the supplier‟s selling proposition to attract new
prospects. The co-creation approach raises questions of accountability, ownership of
intellectual property rights and also of distribution of value. If value creating
capabilities of the supplier are the result of their engagement with a customer, the
question that interviewees posed was the extent to which the customer could share the
benefit from the suppliers‟ future business opportunities.
Overall, our data confirmed that co-creation approaches will become more widely
adopted, and that methods to identify and measure value will have to evolve. For
instance, one of the participating organizations was considering using customer
satisfaction scores as a way to determine the amount they would invoice the customer.
Contractual commercial relationships will also have to develop to accommodate the
nature of these new softer alternative measures, given their context-specific, even
relationship-specific nature.
Mechanisms to identify opportunities to add value will be at the heart of the future role
of sales organizations, an idea that is well encapsulated in the following comment from
a large FMCG organization: “I think mostly a lot of retailers and buyers have data
information that they are now able to turn into knowledge. I think that we now have to
find something else that we can bring to the party because that used to be our added
value and now without that added value we have to have something else that we can
add”.
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10. Re-definition of customer interactions and sales processes
Throughout most of the interviews, informants claimed that pressure to improve sales
force‟s effectiveness was increasing across a number of sectors. Overall, investments in
sales forces have been under scrutiny and their sustainability put into question with the
rise of alternative, cheaper channels. On one hand, there is recognition amongst senior
sales managers that the costs of transactional selling have to be optimized. Internet and
third parties like distributors and intermediaries have emerged as viable alternatives to
optimize sales costs. On the other hand, higher requirements for quality service
delivery from powerful accounts, has suggested the appropriateness of investing in
customer-specific resources.
A number of sales organizations in our study reported to be investing in high end
customers, by appointing multi-functional teams to look after these customers. These
sales teams often comprise several different specialists who interact with the customer
to deliver integrated solutions. This requires coordination which depending on the
market is done by an account manager. In parallel, to be able to resource investments in
key customers, companies are increasingly serving the lower end of their markets with
self-service portals, call centres and resellers, all of which are gradually replacing
internal sales forces. Overall, our respondents recognised that traditional transactional
sales forces will see reductions in numbers over the next few years.
In a context were sales organizations have to streamline their processes for transactional
customers and invest decisively in top accounts, the data showed that the ability to
implement coordinated customer approaches through different channels becomes
essential. It was revealed that this in turn, requires managing customer expectations and
implementing systems that bring together the different contacts that different functions
within the sales organization can have with its customers. Companies reported
instances where channels that operated independently from each other, resulted in lower
levels of satisfaction and poor customer experience.
One of the implications of aiming to achieve higher productivity levels in sales forces is
the formalization of customer interactions. One respondent described how sales
automation systems are increasingly dictating the frequency and nature (face to face vs.
telephone or online) of the interaction between field sales forces and customers. Thus,
personal relationships are being replaced by more formalized and controlled processes.
Sales force‟s autonomy and flexibility has been reduced to ensure coherent and
consistent customer approaches across the sales organization. For sales people in many
sectors, this has meant that they are no longer able to develop personal relationships
with their customers by regularly visiting them, restricting the influence of personal
contact in buyers‟ decision making. As the national sales director of a pharmaceutical
company stated, “often another issue we have, very clearly, is access – actually getting
to see the customer. Doctors are very busy, they don’t necessarily want to see a
representative”. Sales professionals have to find ways to increase the customer‟s
perception of the supplier adopting alternative approaches to the traditional one of
building personal relationships, as the director of the same pharmaceutical company put
it “influencing people, different decision makers, the decision making unit’s changing
within the health authority where it is now much more about value for money and
patient choice”. A number of interviewees described scenarios where new roles for
sales people were emerging.
10

11. Emergence of a new role for sales professionals
A recurrent theme from all our interviewees was the dramatic impact transformations in
markets and technologies have had in the nature of selling and the role of the sales
forces. We have already reported how in many organizations transactional sales is
increasingly been managed through alternative channels, namely internet-enabled. At
the other end, sales professionals looking after key customers are also experimenting
changes in their role. There was wide agreement amongst interviewees from industry,
sales consulting and academia that the scope of the sales person is widening. As one of
the interviewees put it, “the sales force becomes more enabled by technology and by
information to be able to make the decisions to manage the customer, including
decisions well above and beyond its traditional steps of selling. These are decisions that
really involve everything across the spectrum from product design decisions, to pricing
decisions and so forth”.
Higher levels of available market information, coupled with increasingly closer
customer relations, are encouraging sales professionals to take, or at least influence
market-related, financial, even operational decisions. Furthermore, a shift towards a
consultative approach in sales is seen in many sectors as the result of clients expecting
and demanding this type of relationships. In a number of sectors this means that the
stereotype of the sales profession characterized by hard and persuasive tactics is
opening the way to more understanding, collaborative and customer-centric sales
techniques.
For some organizations that participated in the study, customer centricity means that
sales teams are driving forward product and service development, the identification of
longer term business opportunities and the definition of renewed customer management
processes. Other companies reported how technology and knowledge is enabling sales
professionals to make a wider range of decisions, such as financial (pricing), operational
and marketing-related.
Another emerging transformation of the sales role is the internal dimension. It was
recognised that whilst sales people have traditionally been focused on the external
customer, interacting internally with other functional areas of the organization will
increasingly become an essential part of their role. Our data revealed that in many
organizations sales people are becoming the drivers of processes that link the
customer‟s problems and needs with the internal configuration and resource base, in
order to develop solutions that create mutual value.
Our research revealed a little-recognized consequence, which is that increased demands
from customers are gradually resulting in sales role that is able to combine a multi-party
relationship manager role with that of an end-to-end delivery coordinator. Customers
are requiring accountability and ownership of the entire process and value added to the
end customer/consumer. This in-depth understanding, beyond the immediate customer,
was reported to become an essential dimension of the sales role in technological, R&D
intensive and professional services sectors.
New capabilities for the future sales professionals
The role of the future sales professional appears to be one that will require constant
development in the relevant area of expertise/business and in customer management
tools and techniques. In addition to sector-specific knowledge, future sales people will
11

12. have to cultivate customer relationships and at the same time, know-how to become
consultative sellers.
Our analysis of the interviews revealed that there are four skill areas that are important
for the future sales person: Functional, Relational, Managerial and Cognitive.
Functional skills primarily refer to those that would traditionally be called „selling
skills‟, in the context of future sales professionals, skills that underpin the creation of
customer value. Relational skills refer to the ability to interact and connect with
individuals across boundaries and across functions. Managerial skills are general know-
how related to the achievement of goals in organizations. Lastly, cognitive skills refer
to analytical abilities and the extent to which individuals can process and act upon
information. Table 4 outlines key skills in each category mentioned by the interviewees.
Functional Relational Managerial Cognitive
Financial insight Multi level and multi- People management skills Innovative problem
functional relationships solving
Business acumen Understanding of human High ethical and integrity Time management
dynamics standards and task
prioritization
Marketing Ability to contribute and to Influencing skills Lateral thinking
knowledge work in teams (internal organization)
Business opportunity Ability to integrate Openness to change and Mental toughness
discovery and marketing - sales efforts adaptability and resilience
qualification
Strategic negotiation Ability to inspire trust Clarity of communication
(beyond price)
Market and research Listening skills Time management skills
Customer insight Business process
understanding
Table 4: Skill requirements of the new sales role
Organizations recognized that the speed by which transformation in sales have occurred
have superseded their ability to develop new talent who can cope with the new context
of sales. The war for consultative selling talent across sectors is recognized as a real
one, as illustrated by one of the senior business development executives of an IT service
company: “we want to be in the value added business where we’re helping achieve
differentiation, helping make our customers be more competitive, so the biggest
challenge is finding the people’s skills in the market place.
5. Discussion and conclusion
The fact that sales is changing appears to be unquestioned by both existing contributions
to the academic sales research agenda and by practitioner insights from the ten sectors
we explored across the US, UK and Central Europe. There is wide agreement that
changes in the marketplace (namely globalisation, concentration and regulation),
technology and customer demands have impacted the way in which suppliers deal with
customers. Our evidence suggests that a profound polarization between transactional
and consultative selling is growing in sales organizations. The question that emerges is
how sales organizations can respond to potentially diverging forces, ones pressing in the
direction of reducing costs to serve and others in the direction of co-creating superior
customer value. Sales executives need to reconcile this polarization of the sales
function. However, there was not a clear or tried and tested model emerging in our data
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13. about how to create value for the supplier organization with the top end accounts and at
the same time from lower end customers.
A useful way of approaching how to marry high and low end customer management
strategies is Treacy and Wiersema‟s (1993) value model. They argue that highly
successful enterprises focus on operational excellence, product leadership or customer
intimacy, although only outstanding organizations can pursue more than one of these
simultaneously. We chose to refer to Treacy and Wiersema‟s operational excellence as
customer processes optimization, and customer intimacy as engagement in value co-
creation to best describe the elements contained in these approaches that emerged from
the data, which are outlined in table 5.
Strategic alternatives Customer processes optimization Engagement in value co-creation
Dealing with buyer’s behavior Provide ease of purchase, perceived Understanding of buying unit‟s and wider
value for money. organization‟s performance criteria.
Creation of customer value Streamlined value proposition. Expanded and differentiated value
proposition.
Delivers service via self-services
platforms initiated by the supplier to Through co-creation of value initiated
increase efficiency. jointly by the customer and supplier to
increase the relevance and impact of the
solution to the customer business.
Nature of sales interactions Online portals or call centres. Managed by account managers, account
teams and field sales forces.
The role of the sales professional Product-focused and transactional Relationship broker, networking and
Decreasing in size giving way to cheaper coordinating sales teams. Informing and
channels. analyzing business opportunities. Project
Back office customer care helping the managers
customer to complete their transaction.
Capabilities for the sales person Basic technical, product and market Advanced functional, relational,
knowledge managerial and cognitive competences
Table 5. Elements of strategic alternatives for the future of sales
Following Treacy and Wiersema‟s claim that both strategies are difficult to pursue
simultaneously, one would argue that sales organizations then have to follow either of
the two. However, each of these strategic alternatives is fit for one purpose only: high
or low end customers. Very few organizations in our study were in a position to address
high or low end customers only. Most of the companies we interviewed had disparate
customer bases ranging from transactional, medium to key customers. This raises the
question whether organizations can make compatible value creation via customer
processes optimization as well as by engagement in value co-creation.
Research in innovation has shown that in order to compete in the long term, companies
have to develop the ability for both exploring new opportunities and also for exploiting
existing capabilities. Exploitative activities are characterized by routinized and
mechanistic processes to raise productivity and gain efficiencies. Conversely,
explorative activities are associated with higher risks for failure, and also higher
potential gains (March, 1991). Firms that can simultaneously manage exploration and
exploitation are referred to as ambidextrous (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2004; Jansen, van
den Bosch and Volberda, 2005). Ambidextrous organizations combine contradictory
coordination mechanisms that are characterized by decentralization, formalization and
connectedness (Jansen et al., 2005). Ambidextrous organizations often separate
business units focused on exploration from those with an emphasis on exploitative
activities, allowing them to have different processes and structures, but at the same time
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14. maintaining tight links across and high degrees of connectedness (O'Reilly and
Tushman, 2004).
Implications for practice
We have discussed how the increasing polarization between transactional and
consultative selling is resulting in organizations having to devise dual sales strategies,
customer processes optimization for the low customer end and engagement in value co-
creation for top end customers. We have drawn a parallelism between sales and
innovation strategies, arguing that both underpin the firm‟s ability to compete. We have
also suggested that guiding principles for configuring ambidextrous organizations may
help designing the future sales organization.
Ambidextrous organizations require managers who have the ability to understand and
be sensitive to the needs of very different kinds of businesses. They possess both
systematic analysis as well as free-thinking abilities. Ambidextrous managers break into
new business territories and at the same time maintain and defend traditional businesses.
Similarly, the future sales organization will require sales leaders who are willing to
explore new ways of creating value, novel relationship models and innovative supplier-
customer governing mechanisms. One such mechanism may be new contractual
agreements that balance risk and gain sharing mechanisms. For activities with high end
customers, traditional performance measures and monitoring systems may need to be
revisited. The boundaries between supplier and customer are becoming blurred, and
traditional rivalry between suppliers may give way to networks of suppliers,
underpinned by co-opetition (as opposed to competition) tactics that are instilled and
facilitated by the customer.
In addition, sales leaders in ambidextrous sales organizations will have to impose rigid
control mechanisms to manage low end customers sustainably. They will need to be
abreast of latest technologies to automate transactional activities, ensuring seamless
implementation of these technologies. Tight definition of processes and adherence to
them will need to be instigated across the sales organization in order to minimize costs.
Overall, future sales leaders will have to combine organizational separation with senior
team integration, a key leadership challenge
Ambidextrous organizations require high level of capabilities, such as the ones depicted
in table 4. Thus, sales training and development will continue to be a requirement for
organizations that wish to be leaders in their respective markets. Sales professionals will
have to be discerning and flexible to perform their role according to the types of
customers they are dealing with. This will require advanced training and managing
expectations to avoid dissatisfaction amongst those performing potentially repetitive
sales activities for transactional customers, and reward and to reward and recognize
those who may be asked to contribute with higher levels of commitment and dedication
to develop demanding, top end customers.
Making compatible customer processes optimization with engaged value co-creation
approaches will eventually trigger the need of higher degrees of marketing and sales
alignment, in a quest to ensure that product and services are conceived, designed,
communicated and delivered in an integrated way to create a superior customer
experience.
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15. Limitations and suggestions for future research
The main limitation of this research is its context-specificity. Data is collected from
particular organizations from mature markets, which makes the findings of the study
hardly generalizable to wider populations of organizations. In case study research,
however, generalizability is not an aim, as the purpose is to understand a phenomenon
in the context in which it occurs. Pettigrew (1985) argues that case studies are capable
of developing and refining generalizable concepts and frames of reference (p.242). This
study has sought to gain an understanding of the transformations of sales organizations
which makes in-depth understanding more relevant than generalization. This supports
Gummesson‟s (1991) claim that good descriptive or analytic language by which one can
grasp the important characteristics of the system, offers reasonable possibilities for
generalization (p.78).
The study has opened up opportunities for further research. First, replicating the inquiry
in different contexts, such as emerging markets, could help confirming the adequacy of
the sales transformations identified elswhere. The exploratory nature of the research
makes it a good starting point for testing some of the findings in larger samples, using
quantitative methodologies. In particular, research aiming to understand the
organizational responses to transformations in the markets and their outcomes would
illuminate an area much needed in practice.
The specific challenges of sales organizations being organized around both customer
processes optimization and engagement in value co-creation and how companies
manage these diverse structures may provide valuable insights. In addition, the sales
research community would benefit from understanding the complexities of managing
new more sophisticated sales roles, like those in charge of value co-creation.
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