ISBM at the Penn State Smeal College of Business – Academic Institute supporting B2B Research. Switch to the ISBM-Corporate website.
Collaborations between academics and practitioners in the B2B domain can yield critical insights for both groups.
Collaborative actions between peer firms can ultimately contribute to industry growth in a three stage process.
There are costs and benefits to firms having similar networks. These factors must be considered in new product alliances that often fail to meet their desired objectives.
Business-to-business (B2B) buyers often rely on online reviews to make purchasing decisions. However, the impact of a positive or negative review can often vary depending on if the review is written on an internal or external channel.
Channel partners play a critical role in the financial performance of suppliers. One way in which suppliers can provide useful information to their channel partners is through partner relationship management strategies. Aguirre et al. 2018 provide recommendations for how these strategies can generate the most engagement amongst channel partners.
Companies selling to B2B customers face two key issues: managing the salesperson channel and managing the customer-specific discounts often utilized to drive sales. Companies must determine if customers using online channels would benefit from also being served using salesperson channels, or if utilizing salespeople in such a way would be a waste of valuable resources. Lawrence et al. (2019) provide compelling evidence that sellers gain approximately twice as much net profit from customers that have greater contact with salespeople. The interpersonal relationships that salespeople forge with buyers in the B2B context may bring forth positive financial outcomes.
While maintaining relationships between different parties proves imperative across business contexts, the task often becomes challenging in the business-to-business (B2B) domain. Perceptions of fairness in retailer-supplier relationships are a key issue in B2B relationships. Due to multiple suppliers often having active relationships with the same retailer, these perceptions can lead to conflicts. Recent research by Lee and Griffith (2019) studied the social comparisons that occurs, and focus on distributive fairness, reference discrepancies, and tie strength.
As B2B firms increasingly become service-dominant in hopes of building lasting customer relationships, it becomes imperative to determine if the resources and expertise needed to implement B2B service innovations also create increased risk for B2B firms. The differences between customer and business markets find that the impact of service innovations varies across B2B and B2C domains.
Sales negotiation over email exchanges between sellers and buyers (e-negotiation) is increasingly common in B2B sales. The use of influential tactics as textual cues in emails to manage buyers’ attention significantly affects sales outcomes. To test the effectiveness of influential tactics in e-negotiations, the authors of this study analyze seller-buyer emails over a two-year period part of 40 e-negotiations, along with other data sources and a controlled experiment. In an era where remote working is more prevalent than ever, e-negotiations are more important than ever. It underscores the relevance of this research.
One way to gain insight into their customers’ needs is to invite customers to have a seat on the board of directors. Based on a sample of 329 B2B firms in S&P 900 firms over nine-year period (2007-2015), Bommaraju et al. (2019) concluded that having a customer on the board of directors enhances customer orientation of firms and provides unique insights, especially when demand uncertainty is high.
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