Manufacturing firms increasingly migrate from product centered to value
creating business models (Terho et al., 2012). Thus, suppliers do not merely
provide products to customers, but proactively support value creation with
their products in customers’ business application. This change is triggered by
low cost competition, commoditization, and more sophisticated customer demands.
Owing to these market developments, only relying on product centered business
models is not feasible any longer for manufacturers to prosper in the short as
well as long run. The sales function is the most crucial organizational
function to successfully accomplish the adoption of value creating business
models and, similarly, most strongly affected by this change (Blocker et al.,
2012; Ulaga & Loveland, 2014). Despite its relevance, research on this
subject is scarce. While initial conceptual articles underline the urgency of
investigating value creating sales (e.g., Berghman et al., 2006), little
empirical research exists that carves out how manufacturing firms should
effectively implement and organize them. This SIG session aims at motivating
research on the implementation of value creating sales in business
organizations.

The authors investigate the relevance of human and social capital for
building solution crafting
competence. Using data from 799 B2B salespeople within 29 sales
organizations, they reveal the relative importance of salespeople’s customer
and technical knowledge (i.e., human capital) as well as their external and
internal relations (i.e., social capital).