Decision-making in salesperson–customer interaction
Establishing a common ground for obtaining
commitment
Decisions are often made in a two-part sequence,
consisting of a proposal by one party and an aligning response from
others. While this sequence is well established, less is known about
the preparatory work that may precede it. This chapter studies
decision-making in the context of complex service selling. It
demonstrates that and how salespeople and a prospective customer
collaboratively and incrementally establish a decision over a
multi-sequence course of action, in which a sequence implements a
stage and the next sequence implements a next step or outcome of the
prior stage. Thus, the chapter sheds light on how the groundwork for
a proposal is laid. The conversation analytic study is based on 17
video-recorded business-to-business sales meetings in Finland.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Decision-making in business-to-business selling
- 3.Data
- 4.The stepwise construction of customer’s commitment
- 4.1Determining the customer need and a potential
solution
- 4.2Collaborative achievement of an advancement in the business
relationship
- 5.Summary and conclusions
-
Notes
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References