Selling and sales management for successful servitization: a systematic review and research agenda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Servitization—the shift from product to service-centric business models—has attracted widespread attention, yet best practices for selling services and transforming the salesforce remain unclear. In response, this study systematically reviews the literature on selling and sales management for servitization. Analyzing 66 articles across 21 journals, we identify three key themes: customer engagement throughout the purchase journey, skills and abilities of selling actors, and sales management support. Our integrative framework highlights how the selling of services and solutions necessitates a collaborative, cross-functional process of customer engagement across various stages of the journey. Ideally, this engagement fosters recurring cycles with loyalty loops, driven by proactive customer success management. We also present a comprehensive research agenda with four key themes bridging critical gaps in current knowledge. From a managerial perspective, our review underscores that servitization necessitates extensive organizational changes beyond the sales function, affecting not only what firms sell but also how they sell.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".