Decision-making in salesperson-customer interaction: Establishing a common ground for obtaining commitment

Abstract

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.