presentations in different events and the feedback received also strengthened the view that the topic of this dissertation was worthy of studying.
further studies on this topic, especially at the front end of projects but also concerning strategy and along the continuous project marketing process.
This dissertation approached actor participation from the information processing view, which traditionally has an efficiency-seeking point of view at the organisational level of analysis. This means that the overall goal of integration across actors is related to reducing uncertainty. This theory has a limited view, for example, of organisational learning and how individuals co-develop value through an ongoing learning process. Moreover, the focus is often on one firm and its processes, rather than on more complex inter-organisational settings. The information processing view was, however, seen as a proper lens to combine the perspectives of different studies, as the focus was on the solution providers’ point of view. Integration can be approached from other perspectives (e.g. from the power identity or competence points of view) (Salonen & Jaakkola, 2015), each providing a different explanation for why organisations need to integrate. Agency theory and institutional logic offer complementary points of view to the integration discussion in this dissertation.
Future studies could employ different theoretical approaches to strengthen or weaken the implications of this dissertation. For example, internally, utilising organizational culture (e.g., Schein, 2004) point of view could have given interesting insights on why individuals act in a certain way and what are the implications then to sales practices and how people internally change information with each other.
Externally, resource-dependence theory (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) could have been used to study how PBF manages its external relationships and how dependence on the external resources might explain some aspects of the agent utilization. Also, general stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) could have been used as a unifying theoretical lens for identifying, classifying and categorising stakeholders and understanding their behaviour.
As this dissertation employs a qualitative and explorative approach, it has a limited view of the performance of solution providers. As the information processing view is interested in performance and efficiency views, future studies could develop the findings of this dissertation into testable hypotheses that could dig deeper into the issue of, for example, whether internal and external integration with actors leads to better project marketing performance. Also, the moment of involvement in the process (i.e. when the actors participate in the project marketing process) could be studied to figure out how the moment of involvement affects project marketing performance. This would require the employment of more quantitatively oriented methods.
This dissertation is limited to internal and external integration in the project marketing research stream. To provide additional insights into the phenomenon, the focus could be expanded to include more general marketing and sales research. As customer expectations, behaviour and technologies applied in sales are constantly changing (Marcos Cuevas, 2018; Singh et al., 2019; Syam & Sharma, 2018), future studies should concentrate on this changing environment and how it affects project and solution marketing in general. Team selling, integration with marketing and the changing role of salespeople (Marcos Cuevas, 2018; Syam & Sharma, 2018) are some of the changing trends suggested in sales management research in general, but more empirical studies are needed to study these trends, especially in contexts that are traditionally rather conservative in their sales approaches.
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PUBLICATIONS
I. Ståhle, M., & Ahola, T. (2021). Balancing on a tightrope: Coping with concurrent institutional logics in project business. International Journal of Project Management, 40(1), 52–63.
II. Ståhle, M., Ahola, T., & Martinsuo, M. (2019). Cross-functional integration for managing customer information flows in a project-based firm. International Journal of Project Management, 37(1), 145–160.
III. Ahola, T., Ståhle, M., & Martinsuo, M. (2021). Agency relationships of project-based firms. International Journal of Project Management, 39(7).
713–725.
IV. Ståhle, M., Ahola, T., & Martinsuo, M. (2022). Characterizing agent involvement in industrial solution marketing. Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing [Manuscript submitted for publication].
PUBLICATION I
Balancing on a tightrope: Coping with concurrent institutional logics in project business
Ståhle, M. & Ahola, T.
International Journal of Project Management, 40(1), 52–63.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.09.005
Publication reprinted with the permission of the copyright holders.
International Journal of Project Management 40 (2022) 52–63
Available online 27 September 2021
Balancing on a tightrope: Coping with concurrent institutional logics in project business
Matias Ståhle*, Tuomas Ahola
Tampere University, Unit of Industrial Engineering and Management, Korkeakoulunkatu 8, PO Box 541, 33014 Tampere, Finland
A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords:
Project marketing and sales Project business Institutional logics Industrial sales Project organizing
A B S T R A C T
Many firms simultaneously offer tailored projects and standardized equipment, creating a need to balance be-tween two concurrent—and, at times, conflicting—sales logics. While it is known that larger firms may utilize several strategies to cope with sales logics’ conflicting demands, prior research has not adequately addressed how smaller firms address this challenge. Building upon earlier research on managing complexity caused by competing institutional logics and drawing on empirical evidence from a qualitative case study focusing on a firm offering security solutions, we scrutinize how sales of both types of offerings are managed under two sales logics.
We show that the firm may utilize several segmenting, bridging, and demarcating practices both at the orga-nizational and individual level to cope with the logics’ conflicting demands as well as leverage synergistic re-lationships between them. The results encourage the utilization of synergies across logics through dynamic practices when concurrently selling two offering.
1. Introduction
Prior research has shown that project sales is a highly context- specific process that involves multiple stakeholders from both the customer and supplier sides (Cova et al., 2002; Davies et al., 2007), a great deal of creativity (Crespin-Mazet et al., 2019), and frequently re-quires several months, if not years, to secure a contract (Kujala et al., 2007; Artto & Kujala, 2008). While less emphasized in extant research, many firms that provide clients with tailored projects are also providers of standardized equipment. For example, a customer of W¨artsil¨a, a global technology provider for marine and energy markets, may require either the delivery of a fully functional power plant installed on a turnkey basis or a single standardized diesel engine to replace a worn-out engine in its existing power plant. In these two examples, the complexity and amount of interaction that needs to occur between the customer and the provider vary considerably. Whereas the establish-ment of a power plant project may involve the identification of other stakeholders with the required resources, such as financiers and auto-mation providers, a contract for the delivery of a single engine can sometimes be achieved by a single phone call, possibly followed up by a sales visit.
Playing this dual role, many firms need to find ways to excel at managing both the complexity of selling tailored projects and the
repetitiveness and economies of scale involved in selling standardized equipment. While large firms with a global market presence have often responded to this challenge by separating project and equipment sales into different functions (Davies & Brady, 2000), the situation is more complicated for small and medium-sized firms. This kind of separation might not be possible due to limited resources. In smaller firms, the risks of under- or overutilizing available resources and losing potential equipment or project deals can increase if the nature of the two business logics are not properly understood or the possible synergies leveraged.
For example, if sales teams are incentivized based on the number of sales contracts, salespersons may be reluctant to engage in time-consuming negotiations that are required for scoping complex deliveries.
To address this issue, this study draws on institutional theory and, more precisely, the stream of research on institutional logics. This literature addresses how an organization manages under competing or conflicting logics (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Pache & Santos, 2013;
Edvardsson et al., 2014) that give rise to institutional complexity (Smith
& Tracey, 2016). Institutional logics set the “rules of the game” (Fried-land & Alford, 1991) and explain individual behavior in organizations.
For example, people working in a charity organization may highlight the so-called social welfare logic (helping those who need help), but simultaneously the organization needs to comply with efficiency-focused market logic to manage funding demands. In the
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: matias.stahle@tuni.fi (M. Ståhle), tuomas.ahola@tuni.fi (T. Ahola).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
International Journal of Project Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.09.005
Received 28 September 2020; Received in revised form 30 August 2021; Accepted 13 September 2021
International Journal of Project Management 40 (2022) 52–63 same way, when a firm delivers tailored projects as well as standardized
equipment, it may employ the different sales logics that are conceptu-alized here as project sales logic and equipment sales logic. The employ-ment of different logics for equipemploy-ment and project sales leads to increased complexity and even conflicts, which need to be managed at both the organizational and individual levels (Smets et al., 2015).
In the research on project organizing, studies have increasingly applied institutional logics in different settings, such as governing institutional complexity in megaprojects (e.g., Qiu et al., 2019; Biesen-thal et al., 2018), studying how projects can shape institutions (Mat-inheikki et al., 2019; Lieftink et al., 2019), and coping with the complexities in an institutional context (Winch & Maytorena-Sanchez, 2020; Uriarte et al., 2019). However, to the best of our knowledge, prior research has not addressed how firms address the challenge of simul-taneously selling standardized equipment and tailored projects as a specific business solution at both the organizational and individual levels. It is important to concentrate on individual-level practices, as individuals are expected to behave in accordance with and to be conditioned by the institutional logics present in their industry and their firm (Gonçalves et al., 2019; Smets et al., 2015). We do not know how these two coexisting sales logics relate to each other—are they primarily synergistic or conflicting? For example, successful project sales may lead to further equipment deliveries following the project handover, but it is also not unreasonable to expect that project sales might reserve crucial resources (e.g., salespeople or technology support) at the expense of equipment sales (or vice versa).
To address this gap in knowledge, we explore the following research question: What practices do firms use to cope with the tensions arising from two parallel and different sales logics? Our paper draws on an explorative case study focusing on Gatekeeper (pseudonym), a medium-sized firm providing its industrial customers both customized security solutions in the form of projects and standalone standardized security equipment.
More specifically, we focus on the sales function and individual sales-people within the firm. We map organizational- and individual-level practices, which we conceptualize as segmenting, bridging, and demarcating practices (based on Smets et al., 2015). We show that several segmenting practices are required to cope with the competing demands of the two sales logics. In addition, the sales logics are also bridged to take advantage of their complementary aspects. Lastly, demarcating practices maintain the separation of logics when serving diverse customer needs.
In addition to discussing the differences between sales of standard-ized equipment and of tailored projects (Tuli et al., 2007; Ulaga &
Loveland, 2014), this study provides further insights regarding the differentiating and the complementary features of the two sales logics and how the two solutions are sold in practice. As individuals have received less attention in the discussion of institutional logics (Smets et al., 2015; Gonçalves et al., 2019; Pache & Santos, 2013), the results of this study show what kind of practices individuals (salespeople) use in parallel with the organization-level practices. Our results indicate that firms are likely to follow distinct sales logics when serving individual clients, but these two businesses may also complement each other, and the synergies can be leveraged in addition to compromising with the conflicts. The results implicate that individual salespeople have an important boundary spanning role when balancing with the competing demands stemming from the two institutional logics. Finally, the results give an encouraging example on how a firm may simultaneously offer solutions under the competing logics by mapping the practices utilized in the sales process.
The article is structured as follows. First, we introduce the literature on project sales and institutional logics and discuss strategies for coping with institutional complexity. We then present the research approach and findings, focusing on different organizational- and individual-level practices between the two sales logics. We conclude by discussing the
2. Literature review
2.1. Selling tailored solutions as projects
In industrial markets, many firms specialize in the provision of so-lutions tailored to the unique needs of industrial customers (Tuli et al., 2007; Ulaga & Loveland, 2014). In the literature, such deliveries are often referred to as complex products and systems (CoPS) (Davies &
Brady, 2000) or integrated solutions (IS) (Davies, 2004). In this paper, we use the term tailored solution to refer to all kinds of project-based deliveries of solutions tailored to meet unique customer needs.
Tailored solutions are typically high-value offerings that involve a combination of complex and interdependent technologies. Examples of tailored solutions include power plants, high-speed trains, avionics equipment, and flexible manufacturing systems (Hobday 1998).
Tailored solutions are typically purchased by a single user, often an industrial firm or public organization, and their sale and purchase are characterized by the discontinuity of demand, uniqueness of deliveries, and high complexity of both delivered customer solutions and the or-ganizations that need to be established for delivering them (Mandj´ak &
Veres, 1998; Artto & Kujala, 2008).
The delivery of tailored solutions has been widely discussed in project marketing and sales research and project marketing can be broadly defined as the “systematic management of customer, supplier, and other network relationships related to the development and man-agement of the supplier’s business and is designed to achieve the com-pany’s desired operational objectives” (Skaates & Tikkanen, 2003). In this paper, we concentrate on project sales, which can be seen as a subset of marketing and understood as a set of activities performed by the sales force aimed at business engagement with a specific prospective buyer (Skaates & Tikkanen, 2003; Viio & Gr¨onroos, 2014). Project sales is described as a process that includes the search, preparation, bidding, negotiation, and implementation of a project (Cova & Hoskins, 1997;
Jalkala et al., 2010; Turner et al., 2019). Traditionally, salespeople search for customers through cold calls, visits, sending marketing ma-terials, and contacting buyers through web-based tools or social media, at seminars and exhibitions, or through resellers or other sales partners (Cova et al., 2002; Anderson et al., 2009; Agnihotri et al., 2016). Crucial steps in the project sales process include bidding, preparing the offer, and finally negotiating the deal, which might take from several months to several years (Tikkanen et al., 2007; Kujala et al., 2007; Ryyn¨anen et al., 2013; Kujala et al., 2015). This process not only requires the active participation of salespeople but also heavily relies on other functions of the firm (e.g., management, technology, logistics, and project manage-ment) (Artto & Kujala, 2008; Turkulainen et al., 2013).
Project sales research outlines various approaches that firms can utilize when searching for potential customers. The first is a determin-istic approach, where the firm actively follows the marketplace and attempts to anticipate project opportunities, which are typically openly announced public tenders (Cova & Hoskins, 1997; G¨or¨og, 2016). When the firm identifies an attractive project opportunity, it utilizes its re-sources and expertise to provide a solution that fulfills the demands of the potential customer and can be profitably delivered by the firm.
Essentially, the firm must adapt its key resources to meet the re-quirements of the customer. When assuming a constructivistic approach, the firm actively creates project opportunities, such as proposing solu-tions to potential customers, bringing together diverse network actors, and showing how the proposed solutions could contribute to the cus-tomers’ business processes and profitability. These two approaches can also be combined, and the choice between the two approaches is dependent on the customer’s purchasing process, the customer’s behavior norms (objectives, culture, position, ethics), and the suplier’s position in relation to the customer (Cova & Hoskins, 1997).
Previous project sales research has concentrated sales process phases M. Ståhle and T. Ahola