Achieving Cross-Selling Effectiveness in Business-to-Business Markets

Firms in Business-to-Business markets face rising complexity driven by globalization, increased competition and a growing shift of the bargaining power toward the customer. Customers have rising expectations about both off-the-shelf products, purchased through efficient and low-cost transactions, as well as complex solutions for individual needs.
To cope with complex demands and to accelerate growth in competitive markets, firms aim to become more customer-centric by deploying cross-selling as a customer management process. Because organizations often adopt a division-focused structure according to products or geographies, vendors have to coordinate products and services from different divisions according to customer needs to expand their relationships with customers across structural boundaries of the organization. The salesforce plays a key role in realizing a firm’s cross-selling strategy. In their boundary-spanning position, salespeople have to address diverse customer needs in their external environment and coordinate internal teams across divisions and functions to generate value for customers. Given the scarce research on cross-selling, this dissertation aims to enhance the understanding of how firms can promote their cross-selling effectiveness and the cross-selling performance of their salesforce in particular.
This dissertation adopts a cumulative approach, with three single studies. Based on a holistic and qualitative approach, the first study explores challenges and success factors of a firm’s cross-selling effectiveness from both a vendor and customer perspective. To show how salespeople cope with the challenges in cross-selling, the first study also develops a salesforce typology in cross-selling. The second study investigates the role of salesforce motivation as a distinct success factor in a quantitative approach. In particular, the effects of supervisory- and compensation-based control on the salesforce’s cross-selling performance are analyzed in a complex context. The third study is embedded in a transactional context and demonstrates the effect of salesperson distrust on salesperson trust, which subsequently affects customers’ cross-buying intention. Based on a quantitative survey, this study emphasizes the differential effects of salesperson customer-oriented behaviors on the relationship between salesperson distrust and trust. Finally, the findings of the single studies are incorporated into a managerial roadmap that can guide the vendor’s transformation process toward more customer orientation through cross-selling.