Industrial selling of services: a case study of the construction industry in Sweden

Abstract: The field of selling has evolved rapidly during the most recent decade, changing the traditional view of selling from transactional focused to relationship focused. Due to these changes a need for research within industrial selling has been recognized. Furthermore, the growth of the service sector has put emphasis on research within the area of selling services. Thus, the research problem for this thesis has been to gain a better understanding of industrial selling of construction services in Sweden.Two of the main areas within industrial selling are "the selling process" and "team selling". Therefore, these areas were chosen as research questions for this thesis. A literature study was performed, where theories regarding the chosen subject were found, and presented in the Literature Review chapter. Through a case study, personal interviews were conducted at two companies within the construction industry. In both cases selling processes and team roles were recognized. The findings of this thesis suggest that selling processes do exist in both companies. It was also recognized that the selling processes varied depending on type of selling situation. Neither of the processes found in theory were directly applicable to the processes found in the study. However, many of the processes found in theory were partly applicable to the studied companies, where some of the stages in the selling processes were similar between theory and the studied companies. In addition, all of the team roles presented in the theoretical framework were recognized in both companies. No additional roles were identified in this study.