Toward a guanxi-bases view of structural holes in sales gatekeeping: A qualitative study of sales practices in China
Toward a guanxi-bases view of structural holes in sales gatekeeping: A qualitative study of sales practices in China
复制标题
以关系为基础看待销售把关中的结构性漏洞：对中国销售实践的定性研究
DOI：
10.1016/j.indmarman.2018.08.001
复制
发表时间：
2019-01-01
影响因子：
10.3
通讯作者：
Zhang, Jing
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Du, Mingfei;Gao, Hongzhi;Zhang, Jing
销售经理经常聘请关系看门人，他们与客户组织中的关键经理或决策者建立个人联系，以在紧密联系的网络市场中弥补销售关系中的结构性漏洞（“缺乏直接联系”）。通过对14位外企本地销售经理和7位中国本地看门人的访谈，我们旨在了解不同类型的关系（“特殊的个人关系”）基础和相关的社会关系如何相互作用，并共同弥补销售管理中的结构性漏洞。我们提出了一些主张，以捕捉销售看门人的方法、基础、规则和奖励的本质（这是指在销售经理和客户经理之间的社交和业务互动中，关系看门人提供便利的过程）。我们进一步开发了一个框架，用于理解销售把关中同质和异质结构孔在关系基础和把关关系方面的差异。这一新框架具有重要的理论和实践意义，因为它使研究人员和实践者能够评估中国商业网络结构孔的关系基础特征，并确定销售管理中不同目的的守门人关系（象征性与互惠性）。
Sales managers often engage relational gatekeepers who connect personally with key managers or decision makers in the client organization to broker the structural holes ('absence of direct connections') in sales relations in closely-knit networked markets. Based on interviews with fourteen local sales managers working for foreign companies and seven local gatekeepers in China, we aim to understand how different types of guanxi ('particularistic personal ties') bases and related social ties interact with one another, and together bridge structural holes in the sales management. We develop propositions to capture the essence of approaches, bases, rules, and rewards in sales gatekeeping (which refer to a process that involves the facilitation provided by relational gatekeepers in social and business interactions between a sales manager and a client manager in sales). We further develop a framework for understanding the differences in terms of guanxi bases and gatekeeper ties between homogeneous and heterogeneous structural holes in sales gatekeeping. This new framework has important theoretical and practical implications, as it allows researchers and practitioners to evaluate the guanxi-base characteristics of structural holes in business networking in China, and to determine the appropriate gatekeeper tie for the different purposes of gatekeeping (symbolic vs. reciprocal) in sales management.