Part of
Intersubjectivity in Action: Studies in language and social interactionEdited by Jan Lindström, Ritva Laury, Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 326] 2021
► pp. 163–
Edited by Jan Lindström, Ritva Laury, Anssi Peräkylä and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 326] 2021
► pp. 163–
Decision-making in salesperson–customer interaction
Establishing a common ground for obtaining commitment
Decisions are often made in a two-part sequence, consisting of a proposal by one party and an aligning response from others. While this sequence is well established, less is known about the preparatory work that may precede it. This chapter studies decision-making in the context of complex service selling. It demonstrates that and how salespeople and a prospective customer collaboratively and incrementally establish a decision over a multi-sequence course of action, in which a sequence implements a stage and the next sequence implements a next step or outcome of the prior stage. Thus, the chapter sheds light on how the groundwork for a proposal is laid. The conversation analytic study is based on 17 video-recorded business-to-business sales meetings in Finland.
Keywords: decision-making, business meetings, customer interaction, sales encounters, business-to-business marketing, conversation analysis, institutional interaction, Finnish
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Decision-making in business-to-business selling
- 3.Data
- 4.The stepwise construction of customer’s commitment
- 4.1Determining the customer need and a potential solution
- 4.2Collaborative achievement of an advancement in the business relationship
- 5.Summary and conclusions
-
Notes -
References
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