Sales Management and Customer Value

This course is highly applied and highly interactive. It focuses on the management of one of the most important processes of companies, that is on the customer management process, with an emphasis on business markets. As companies´ main goal is to create value for customers, effective customer management is highly important for the survival and success of the companies. In this course, we use current real-live cases to discuss how to successfully manage customers and companies´ sales organization, particularly in a B-to-B setting.

Required material

• Johnston, Mark W. and Greg W. Marshall (2021), Sales Force Management. 13th ed. New York: Routledge, chapters 1-6 (case studies not required).
• Additional material as distributed in class

This highly practical course aims at giving participants an advantage over other students in landing a job after their studies. This is because companies desperately look for students with sales-related knowledge and skills, but only few universities offer courses with a focus on sales management. This course has a focus on business markets because many students will start their jobs in business-to-business companies after their studies.

Specifically, creating customer value is highly important for firm success, and customer management (with positions such as key account management) and sales management (e.g., with online channels) are at the heart of creating customer value. In this course, students will learn how companies may effectively attract, interact with and retain customers, and how the companies successfully manage their sales function.

Successful participants will have:

• developed an up-to-date and integrated overview about successfully creating customer value and effective sales management;
• understood how managers (e.g., customer success manager, key account manager, sales manager) apply this knowledge in organizations;
• developed critical thinking skills that can be applied as a manager in customer management situations (e.g., when deciding how to successfully sell through an online channel);
• the ability to effectively deal with issues involved in managing business customers and companies´ sales organization.

In presence

The highly interactive pedagogy includes:

• in-class: discussion, mini-cases, case presentations;
• online: videos, readings, small assignments, online materials.

Attending the first two hours of the course and “presentation day” (i.e., the final Friday morning of this course) is mandatory.

Written exam (60min) (60%) + in-class presentation (teamwork) (40%)