Industrial selling : case studies of Swedish manufacturing small and medium sized enterprises

Sammanfattning: The research problem in this thesis has been formulated as: How can industrial selling performed by Swedish manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises in the different selling situations be characterized? The research problem has been further developed in forms of three research questions dealing with selling activities, individuals involved in selling, and selling processes in the different selling situations. The selling situations included are; new selling task, modified selling task and routine selling task. Selling in this study has been defined as the activities performed by any individual(s) for the purpose of doing business at an individual customer level. Further, small and medium-sized companies have been defined as companies with 10-249 employees. The intention with this research has not been to quantitatively describe and generalize findings to all Swedish manufacturing SMEs. Instead, an exploratory and descriptive perspective has been adopted. The ambition, however, have been to begin to understand how Swedish manufacturing SMEs perform industrial selling. The approach for this study is to be considered qualitative. In order to address our research problem and research questions, four case studies in two different industries were investigated. Within the manufacturing industry, one small and one-medium sized company was selected. Similarly, one small and one medium-sized company in the electronics industry were identified. Personal interviews were used in order to collect data. Totally, we have interviewed 19 respondents in different positions within the selected companies. The findings indicate that selling activities performed by the manufacturing SMEs in this study are complex and includes a variety of different activities. In addition to activities included in the conceptual framework, a new class of activities was identified, where the selling company was engaged in developing the customer's operations fundamentally. The individuals we found to be involved in selling were many and represented several different functions within the selling company. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the studied companies included external individuals when performing their selling. Finally, we also found that the performed selling activities could be described in several selling processes. Our findings indicate that the selling processes vary from rather simple and transaction-oriented selling processes to more complex processes dealing with both long-term customer relationships and single transactions.