Salespeople are from Mars, purchasers are from Venus : matching sales to purchasing

There is no business without sales and no sales without customers. The bridge that spans business‐to‐business (B2B) selling and their customers is termed a buyer‐seller relationship. The contemporary buyer‐seller environment presents salespeople with the challenge of finding ways to overcome the current ineffectiveness of many previously effective sales approaches. The effectiveness of many sales approaches has been questioned based on the ongoing paradigm shift in the purchasing domain. Purchasing based changes have had, and are expected to continue to have a tremendous influence on the buying process. Yet, the different roles in buyer‐seller relationships are, in the Marketing and Sales domain, either studied from the buyer’s perspective or from the seller’s point of view. Buying organizations, however, are gradually shifting power to the purchasing function. For sales practitioners and sales researchers, this ongoing shift demands a study in the evolution of the purchasing function in order to improve their sales approaches. This doctoral thesis analyzes the domain of Buyer‐Seller Relationships in B2B contexts, with an emphasis on Personal Selling and Sales Management. The objective of this dissertation is to obtain a better understanding of how changes in market conditions and advances in technology have empowered the B2B purchaser, thereby creating new challenges to the sales organization and sales function. The first essay of this dissertation is based on an extensive review of the Buyer‐Seller literature and is a call to sales practitioners to pay more attention to the purchasing function and to develop sales strategies and sales approaches that cater to the customers’ purchasing function. The research contribution of the first essay is a presentation of a research grid for future sales research. This framework depicts avenues for future sales research that encompasses the important topics that are considered to be important for the Purchasing & Supply Management (PSM) and the Buyer‐Seller research domains. Based on findings from the first essay, the second essay entails how the sales side should first understand specific purchaser’s jargon, the strategic importance of their offer while looking through a purchaser’s lens, to then adapt the sales messaging based on particular knowledge needs by the purchaser. This results in a selling approach that further advances the curren versions of value‐based selling, and contributes to the sphere of salespeop