Which B2B Thinker Are You?

Despite its contribution to the developed and emerging economies, business-to-business (B2B) sales have been underrepresented in the marketing literature. Much of the B2B sales and marketing (S&M) literature covers traditional, transaction-marketing-related topics. To determine recent trends in thinking, this descriptive study evaluated 201 contributions to the B2B S&M domain. A factor analysis revealed three dimensions across the resulting new themes: relationship selling, management of sales and tactical selling. The factor scores were then clustered into four schools of thought: transactionists, blue suiters, servants and partners. The tandem clustering method presented provided a generalisable approach to qualitatively explore new themes through an iterative literature search and then quantitatively analyse theme patterns across authors to describe schools of thought in a taxonomy.