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The increasingly complex business-to-business (B2B) sales process necessitates that sales managers strike the right balance between appropriate resource allocation, while also maintaining the profitability of the organization. While previous research has mainly focused on how changes in the business environment pose distinct challenges to salespeople, very little research has focused on how sales managers should react to these complex situations. Drawing upon the extant sales research, this paper aims to point to a gap in the literature of how sales managers deal with the complexity associated with the sales process and deal with the same.

Methods from the grounded theory research approach were used to conduct 18 in-depth interviews with B2B sales managers. Purposive sampling was used to identify the participants.

A taxonomy of sales situations that reflects the changing complexity of the sales function and how sales managers need to orchestrate their resource allocation decisions to ensure appropriate value capture from B2B relationships emerged within the themes. This paper highlights four fundamental tenets of sales situations that account for both the complexity of the sales process and the value appropriation challenge that sales managers face.

The taxonomy will help sales managers have a better understanding of the changing complexity in the B2B sales process and help them with decisions making. Sales managers can orchestrate their resource allocation to achieve value appropriation.

This paper develops a new taxonomy of the sales situation. It unravels the changing complexity of the B2B sales process and discusses how value appropriation can be achieved by sales managers.

This paper aims to investigate how different trajectories can be detected and classified in business models (BMs) at the level of their underlying product development value-structure (value-creation and appropriation), and what are the drivers. Such BMs are run by multinational firms to accommodate various technologies and innovations; however, this is stressful because of inherent incompatibilities and conflicts.

An explorative study of six product cases from Du Pont’s Textiles Fiber Division (DTFD), namely, nylon yarns, knits and wovens, DTFD blockbusters, Coolmax^®, MicroMattique™, filling materials and Supriva™, is conducted.

In value-creation, technology push or market pull yields resultant technology-forward or market-back trajectories. For value appropriation, new growth opportunities or continuous market expectations lead to breakthrough or continuous innovations. Consistent and inconsistent combinations of these trajectories yield four differential drivers: technological breakthrough, market-back technology, continuous technology and continuous market-back. This is supported by relevant supply chain strategies, either focused through joint ventures and licensees for commodities or vertically integrated for specialty products.

The paper adds to the analysis of ambidexterity in the value structure of BMs along constituent value-creation and appropriation, thus providing a logical lens to understand various complementarities that exist in terms of opposing technology trajectories and product innovation repertoire.

This study contributes to the knowledge of product innovation management in the textile industry, where both large-scale innovation and operational excellence are challenged over the past few decades.

The lessons learnt address the fundamental issue of higher value generation through configuration of multiple contrasting value-structure elements.

Value appropriation and value creation are two sides of the same coin. How B2B seller’s value appropriation impacts customer relationship performance still remains an under-researched topic. This paper aims to probe into this question in the context of Chinese B2B markets.

This study identifies two kinds of value appropriation, namely, competitive and non-competitive and then examines their impacts upon customer relationship performance, as well as the moderating roles of distributive fairness and procedural fairness, based on questionnaire survey among 273 Chinese B2B firms.

The authors find that seller’s competitive value appropriation has negative impact upon customer relationship performance, and this link is positively moderated by customer-perceived distributive fairness. Besides, non-competitive value appropriation by the seller has significant and positive impact upon customer relationship performance, and this link is positively moderated by customer-perceived procedural fairness.

The paper contributes greatly to literature of value management and industrial buyer–seller relationship. Managerial implications are provided for B2B companies operating in Chinese market to tackle with the tradeoff between appropriating sufficient value and retaining harmonious relationship with customers.

A highly relevant issue for management is the measurement and appropriation of jointly created value. The existence of relationships is challenging for accounting and for the sharing and appropriation of values. Interdependences that characterise business relationships make value measurement and appropriation problematic. Yet, measuring value is important for orienting managers’ behaviours, and it affects the solutions implemented in business relationships on which value creation and appropriation depend. Values are created in relationships because resources are combined through relationships. Defining clear boundaries is important to produce measurements, but setting boundaries in interdependent relationships and networks is always problematic, and to some extent, arbitrary.

Business relationships have a number of soft and multiple effects that are difficult to measure and consequently difficult to divide among the involved business actors creating specific appropriation problems. An interesting development is underway as companies attempt to develop special tools for handling these problems.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how value can be better defined and to understand the drivers of value appropriation in business relationships. In doing so, the authors explore the role that power plays in determining the sharing of value in those relationships.

This paper contains a conceptual discussion about value and the appropriation of value in business relationships, which leads to the development of a methodology for assessing the sharing of value.

In this paper, the authors have developed a view of total value in supply chain relationships. They argue that the value of the relationship is the sum of the customer and supplier value, including both tangible and intangible benefits and sacrifices. In addition, they maintain that the appropriation of value in a business relationship is reliant upon: the power both parties possess; the direct and tangible value each party has to offer; and the indirect and intangible value that each has to offer. They also provide a methodology, which can be used to determine the sharing of value between two actors within a business exchange.

In arriving at the conceptualisation of total value and in the discussion of value appropriation in business relationships, the authors drew upon extant literature. However, a limitation is that they were unable to fully consider all the academic discourse centred on value and value appropriation.

The discussion brings together the issues of customer value and supplier value to the concept of “total value”. Thereafter, it links the contentious issue of buyer and supplier power, so as to better understand the appropriation of value in business relationships.

This paper explains why some firms manage to capture disproportionate value from their network of relationships, leading to superior performance. The paper examines how a firm's dependencies affect its value appropriation potential (VAP) in economic networks.

The paper follows the axiomatic method and the embeddedness perspective of firms to develop an index called nodal power, which captures the power that accrues to a firm in exchange-based economic networks. Thereafter, using the formal method and simulation, it shows nodal power reflects a firm's VAP in economic networks.

The study analysis and findings prove that a firm's dyadic level exchange relations and the embedded network structure determine its VAP by affecting the nodal power. A firm with lesser nodal power is likely to appropriate less value from its relations even if it equally contributes to the value creation. This finding explains how the structural and relational characteristics of a firm's network enable disproportionate value appropriation.

Nodal power furthers the scope of analyzing firms' economic relationships and changing power equations in dynamic networks. It can help firms build optimal strategic networks and manage the portfolio of relationships by predicting the impact of changing relations on firms' VAP.

The paper's original contribution is to explain, through formal analysis, why and how the structure and nature of relations of firms affect their VAP. The paper also formalizes the power-dependence principle through a dependency-based index called nodal power and uses it to show how interfirm dependencies are key to value appropriation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influencing factors on cattle breeders’ payment system choices using cross-sectional data collected in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Rio Grande do Sul. The investigation aims to analyze the problem of value appropriation comparing the payment based on carcass index with live weight mode under the perspective of “bovine for slaughtering” as a multidimensional product with various attributes.

This study employs a generalized order logistic regression model in a survey with 69 cattle breeders’ interview to conduct the empirical analysis.

The empirical results show that measurement difficulties and collective actions influence farmers’ choice to a less efficient payment system in quality terms and value appropriation problems, while the trust level in the slaughterhouse pushes to a more efficient system. Furthermore, trust was presented as more important than technological aspects and long-time relationship as well as collective action corroborates to increase bargaining power and to solve conflicts. In sum, trust, measurement and bargaining power brought traditional and alternative solutions to solve conflicts such as well-designed payment indicators, collective actions and transaction costs.

This study used first-hand survey and proxy variables on cattle farmers’ payment system choices. Another contribution is the focus on two regions with two different payment systems in the same institutional environment in a way to suggest mechanisms of private strategies and public policy to reduce opportunistic value appropriation as well as decreasing conflict.

Understanding how firms manage multiple stakeholders is an academic and business call. This paper aims to describe a firm’s processes to implement a stakeholder value creation system, defined as the firm’s processes to create appropriate value with multiple stakeholders.

The authors based their investigation on a conceptual framework extracted from a previous literature review. From there, the authors conducted qualitative empirical research designed as a multiple-case study. In-depth interviews with 47 people from 11 different firms are the key source of this study.

This paper proposes a framework demonstrating how a firm can implement a stakeholder value creation system. Results pointed to three processes: value creation, distribution and capture. Value distribution mechanisms are drivers for both value creation and capture processes. The system is a set of multiple flow relationships between the firm and its stakeholders.

This research is limited to the Brazilian context.

The stakeholder value creation system is composed of seven elements: walk-the-talk organizational behavior, stakeholder business model, societal non-attended need, stakeholder preference matrix, stakeholder bargaining power, retention of rents and governance mechanism. Managers may design their firm’s unique processes using these elements as drivers.

The present investigation demonstrates that societal issues matter for firms to formulate strategies that positively impact their economic, social and environmental results.

The authors investigated competitive strategy concepts of value creation and appropriation from a combination of resource-based and stakeholder theories and a system perspective. The framework of this study consolidated both theories’ ideas from a complementary perspective. The authors suggest managers and academics should adopt the power of the “AND” position instead of the “OR” trade-off position.

In demand-driven markets, customer value, sometimes called perceived use value or consumer surplus, is defined by the customer rather than the firm. The value a firm can appropriate, its profits, is driven by the customer’s willingness to pay for the value they receive, adjusted by costs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that helps understand value creation and appropriation in demand-driven markets and shows how to influence them through strategic decision-making.

This paper uses an axiomatic approach combined with an extended analytical formulation of the jobs-to-be-done framework to contextualise demand-driven markets. It mathematically derives implications for managerial decision-making concerning selecting customer segments, optimising customer value creation and maximising firm value appropriation in a competitive environment.

Rooting strategic decision-making in the jobs-to-be-done framework allows distinguishing between what customers want to achieve (goal), what product attributes need to be satisfied (opportunity space/constraints) and what value creation criteria related to features are important (utility function). This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done, the problem of identifying which customer segments to serve, what product to offer and what price to charge, can be formulated as an optimisation problem that simultaneously (rather than sequentially) solves for the three decision variables, customer segments, product features and price, by maximising the value that a firm can appropriate, subject to maximising customer value creation and constrained by the competitive environment.

Applying the derived results to simultaneously deciding which customer segments to target, what product features to offer and what price to charge, given a set of competing products, allows managers to increase their chances of winning the competitive game.

This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done and simultaneously focusing on customers, product features, price and competitors enhances firm profitability. Strategic decision-making is formulated as an optimisation problem based on an axiomatic approach contextualising demand-driven markets.

This chapter addresses the dynamics in inter-organizational relations. The authors probe the value networks so prevalent within contemporary ­manufacturing to put forward that their basic cooperation/competition duality manifests itself in practical terms as capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes. The authors conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study aimed at capturing the process by which inter-organizational collabor­ation in ­manufacturing value networks is enacted. Our study finds that inter-organizational relations are “nested” in that a relationship plays out over an interpersonal network where the inter-organizational relationships are a framework for action, while simultaneously interpersonal interactions affect how the inter-organizational relationships take shape and evolve. Furthermore, we found that inter-organizational dynamics is essentially a stratified process. Solving particular and concrete problems at the surface level, with regard to specific collaboration issues between organizations, simultaneously shapes truces with regard to the underlying capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes.