What is it about?
In business-to-business (B2B) markets, often large customer accounts are management by selling teams composed of people from different functional backgrounds (i.e., sales, marketing, supply-chain etc.). Success of such key account management (KAM) teams depends on the structure of relationships within the selling team and how the selling team manages the relational ties with the buyer firm. Using social network theory, we capture the relational ties as two networks, buyer-seller and within-seller network, and analyze the interplay among various structural and functional composition aspects of these two networks. We find that certain specific alignments between the two networks help seller increase their profitability from the key accounts.
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Why is it important?
We consider cross-network interactions across the within-seller and buyer-seller network, and these are often overlooked. Our findings show that dense ties at both the networks play substitutive role, whereas centralization in within-seller network plays a complementary role. Contrary to past findings, that suggest centralization as not being beneficial in teams setting, our findings show that centralization can help boundary spanning selling teams, especially when the selling team has dense ties with buyer firm, as the selling team needs to coordinate both with internal and external stakeholders. In addition, rather that considering cross-functional teams as panacea, managers should carefully align cross-functional teams with their functional counterparts from buyer firm in order to improve profitability for the seller.
Perspectives
With this article, we shed more light on key account management, an under researched area, which is critical for selling firms. Our work takes a deep dive into the relational aspect of selling teams used to manage such key accounts. We take a cross-level network perspective, first of its kind in marketing, by considering both, the relational ties structure between the buyer-seller representatives and the relational ties structure within-seller selling team. Joint consideration of interplay across these two networks allowed us to uncover some nuanced findings that challenge the prior understanding of managing such relationships. We hope that this article spurs further interest in the area of key account management and customer relationship management, and application of cross-level network analysis approach to other interfirm settings.
Aditya Gupta
Texas State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Within-Seller and Buyer–Seller Network Structures and Key Account Profitability, Journal of Marketing, November 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0022242918812056.
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