SUMMARY

There is a rich and diversified body of literature on customer value in business markets. For many years, customer value has been described as the cornerstone of the business marketing discipline (Anderson and Narus 1999), and scholars and practitioners alike have built on the fundamental tenet that “value creation and value sharing can be regarded as the raison d’être of collaborative customer-supplier relationships” (Anderson 1995; p. 349).

While there is general agreement about the relevance of customer value to B2B marketers, it comes as a surprise that, still today, after so many years of research and publications in the academic and business literatures, customer value remains a recurring topic in company boardrooms and executive education programs around the globe. The reason of why the debate on customer value seems to never go away lies probably in the fact that, despite the consensus about why firms must focus on customer value, we still lack knowledge of how to practice value-based marketing every day. In other works, implementing customer value at the functional level remains challenging. This is particularly true in sales (Rackham and DeVincentis 1999).

Does Value-Based Selling (in short VBS) lead to superior salesperson performance? What are the determinants of VBS at the individual salesperson’s level? Which organizational factors need to be in place to facilitate the emergence of VBS in B2B sales organizations? In the present research, we address these important questions. We first develop a conceptual model and related research hypotheses. We then report the findings of an empirical study among sales organizations in Europe, North America, and Asia. We conclude by discussing academic amd managerial implications of our results amd provide direction for future research.

METHODOLOGY AND SAMPLE

In the present study, we employed a multilevel research design whereby data were collected at the organizational as well as the sales force level. Data were collected among business-to-business firms in energy, ICT, industrial and materials industries. Firms in our sample were global organizations with strong market positions. The companies had international sales organizations in Europe, North-America, or Asia. Firms were either in the process of implementing or already practicing value-based selling approaches in their respective organizations.

In each firm, we first contacted senior sales executives (i.e. vice president of sales, head of sales, sales director). Participating firms provided contact information for respondents both at the organizational level (i.e. sales managers) and the individual salesperson level (i.e. customer-facing sales people). Data were collected using a web-based survey tool for both respondent groups. We received a total of 816 salesperson responses from 30 organizations with a minimum of 15 and an average of 27 salesperson responses per organization. Sales persons were mostly highly qualified expert salespeople with an average of 13.65 years of experience in sales. Participants held job titles, such as sales manager or customer engagement manager.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In the present study, we find that value-based selling represents a strong driver of salesperson performance. This finding particularly holds in situations where salespeople (1) own a potent network at their customers’ firms, (2) can rely on value assessment tools in their customer networking activities, and (3) can leverage a portfolio of reference customers to add credibility to their value promises. When these conditions are absent, however, value-based selling becomes an ineffective sales approach with no significant or even negative impact on salesperson performance.

Our results show that VBS explains salesperson performance beyond other prominent sales approaches, i.e. adaptive selling and customer-oriented selling. More precisely, our findings shed light on important drivers of VBS at the individual salesperson level. They highlight the role of salespersons’ individual traits and the growing importance of social ties that sales people develop over time.

Most importantly, our findings also show that VBS alone will not much affect salesperson performance. It is only by investigating key moderating variables that the effects of VBS come to light. This finding bears important managerial implications. VBS initiatives solely targeted at the individual salesperson level are doomed to fail, or will likely remain without major impact at best. Enrolling sales people in specialized sales training programs or focusing attention on front-line salespersons will not suffice. Our findings rather suggest that many factors – both at the individual and organizational levels – must come together for successfully implementing value-based sales. It is by investing in value assessment tools, establishing company-wide VBS processes and making customer references available that management can and must create the organizational environment that will enable salespersons to succeed in practicing VBS.

As with any research, the choices made in this study lead to limitations, which offer fruitful research avenues. For example, our study is subject to the limitations of survey-based research. What is more, we limited our investigation to a small number of antecedents and moderators of VBS. Future research could investigate other important factors at both levels.