Examining Sales and Purchase Approaches in Complex Business Relationships: An Abstract

Abstract

The present study is based on a teleological framework adapted from complexity sciences (Stacey et al. 2000). The framework has not been applied in a business-to-business (B2B) service setting. The relevance in this context lies in that it considers the dimension of time involved between a service provider and its customers in complex business relationships.

The purpose of this study is to examine customers’ expectations of the service provider’s service offer before purchase and the same customers’ perceptions of the service solution offered after purchase in a business-to-business context.

Based on prior research (Padin et al. 2015), this study focuses on three categories of teleological actions in complex business relationships, namely, transformative, formative, and rationalist. Prior research has found significant differences between customers’ and salespeople’s viewpoints (Tuli et al. 2007) and their unique perspective on relational interactions (Tähtinen and Halinen 2002). Only recently, scholars have started to empirically apply the teleological actions in marketing contexts (Svensson and Padin 2016).

The mixed methods approach has been successfully used to study buyer-seller relationships in the software industry (Parry et al. 2012). We report the findings based on 57 customers of a service provider of a complex software solution.

In short, service offer complexity along with a dynamic and constantly evolving processes which involve many people from both companies seem to be relevant variables affecting the formation of customers’ service expectations and performance in the case under study. The length of the relationship and the importance of the service provider to the customer do not seem to play a major role in affecting customers’ service expectations and perceptions.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this is the first study to apply the teleological framework in a B2B service context. It provides a different time-oriented understanding of how customer expectations before purchase, and their perceptions after purchasing a complex service solution in the B2B context, are developed. This finding is particularly relevant for the service literature because “very few research papers explicitly consider business customer experiences,” as recently argued by Zolkiewski et al. (2017).

This study makes a theoretical contribution by stressing the importance of the human element in providing the service offer. Furthermore, it provides additional qualitative evidence of the relevance of the adaptive behavior of salespeople while interacting with customers (Svensson and Padin 2016).