From the Dyad to the Service Ecosystem: Broadening and Building Theory in Sales—An Abstract

Changes in modern and dynamic markets are bringing about major changes to the sales role. Some believe these changes will diminish the strategic importance of salespeople. Others believe the strategic importance of salespeople will increase. Moreover, although sales scholars generally recognize that salespeople operate among a set of actors, work employing systemic perspectives that account for such interrelations is generally nonexistent. Herein, we employ a service-ecosystem and service-dominant (S-D) logic perspective to articulate that salespeople, more broadly: (1) reciprocally and dynamically foster direct and indirect service-for-service exchange (i.e., the application of knowledge and skill for the benefit of another (Vargo and Lusch 2004); (2) play an important role in institutionalization processes—the maintenance, disruption, and change (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006) of institutions (i.e., practices, assumptions, norms, laws, beliefs, and values among other attributes) that enable and constrain practices of social actors by simplifying and enabling thinking (Scott 2001); and (3) discover and resolve inconsistencies and contradictions in the institutional arrangements of various actors by aiding alignment in the narrative infrastructures of actors across service ecosystems. We propose that salespeople facilitate alignments in the narratives of systemic actors through interaction with other actors. Partly attributable to this, salespeople connect actors—as well as their narratives—across the service ecosystem. Hence, the establishment of relational norms and delivery of the firm’s value proposition, often the focus of more contemporary sales-buyer research, are only part of salespeople’s responsibilities and involvement in alignment processes. Indeed, responsibilities and involvement in alignment processes include ensuring that actor’s stories are heard, reconciled, and acted upon. In this capacity, salespeople identify opportunities to exchange service-for-service and align narratives by uncovering inconsistencies and contradictions in institutional arrangements and by providing discursive venues to, at least partly, resolve these inconsistencies and contradictions. In doing so, salespeople play a pivotal role in aligning stories to form a narrative infrastructure without ever becoming the master story teller. Therefore, salespeople serve in a necessary role whose strategic importance to organizations is likely to increase as the complexity of the marketplace increases. In this pursuit, we illuminate that institutionalization and resource integration are the bases for much of change in the sales role. Moreover, we articulate that service-for-service exchange generally occurs at where conceptions of problems and solutions tend to be misaligned, and the perceived benefits to costs of coordinating with other actors are low. Hence, salespeople (among other actors) not only coordinate resources but also facilitate relational contracts and bring about institutionalization, which results in greater convergence of perceived problems and solutions by aligning the narrative infrastructures of actors within the service ecosystem.