What is the Outcome of Selling in Business Relationships?

In a B2B context, interactions between buyers and sellers typically involve more than the transaction as firms develop business relationships of different kinds before, during and beyond the transactions. Beyond loosely coupled firms and weak ties, firms often take a relational approach to their customers and develop structural bonds. The inherent complexities of business relationships pose a major challenge for selling as such relationships can be considered an extra task for sales executives to deal with – and an extra investment for firms that try to develop business with new customers. In this conceptual paper, we isolate “selling” from “relating” and discuss theoretical and managerial implications of these two different but highly connected processes.