Research on the Consultative Selling Competencies of B2B Salesperson: IBM’s Case

The importance of the consultative selling in B2B sales for providing customer’s value is being more and more emphasized. However, Korea’s researches on this are not active. This study primarily reviews the characteristics of the consultative selling by examining previous researches. Secondly, it extracts the ethical selling as the seventh competence of the consultative selling, added to the six competencies of the consultative selling(Park, Ahn, & Cho, 2013), through a literature review. Thirdly, it analyzes the consultative selling competencies of IBM, a pioneer of it, by using the framework of the above seven competencies. As a result, "Ethical selling in the relationship with the customer as well as the company" has been extracted as the seventh competence of the consultative selling and it has been proven that IBM‘s organization, process, and education has supported the reinforcement of the consultative selling competence by using the above analysis framework. Moreover, it is proven that the competence of ethical selling has completed IBM’s consultative selling, through the salesperson’s authenticity as well as the company’s strong execution to uproot unethical selling behaviors. Implications and future research issues are discussed.