Wim Biemans

• Phd
• Professor (Associate) at University of Groningen

Purpose This paper aims to improve marketing managers’ use of information from sales. The authors propose and empirically test the link between cross-functional trust and marketing’s use of information from sales, and whether this effect is contingent on marketing’s power within the firm. Design/methodology/approach Cross-sectional survey data wer...

The role of sales has changed dramatically during the last two decades, with sales becoming increasingly strategic and encroaching on domains that traditionally belong to marketing. Many studies address the role of marketing in new product development (NPD) success, but research on the increasing importance of sales, its changing role and changing...

The new product development ( NPD ) literature is rife with suggestions to involve customers in the innovation process, and many firms collaborate with customers. But the extant literature does not offer much guidance concerning the nature and quality of involving such a network of customers. This paper contributes to the extant literature on custo...

The existing NPD literature discusses new product introductions and product deletions, but largely ignores product replacements. But, especially in business markets, product replacements create their own set of management problems. This paper explores the issues involved in managing product replacements in business markets.

New service development ( NSD ) is a growing innovation discipline. Despite the growth of articles about NSD , several authors have criticized the lack of attention paid to NSD , compared with new product development ( NPD ), and the lack of consensus across NSD findings. At the same time, others have proclaimed that NSD is a sophisticated, mature...

Many companies, large and small, struggle with making the relationship between sales and marketing work. Even though both functions are focused on customers their relationship is all too often problematic and fraught with misunderstandings and conflict. This book offers the first comprehensive perspective on the functioning of sales-marketing inte...

The new product development ( NPD ) literature emphasizes that the success of new products strongly depends on a firm's capability to understand customer needs and translate them into new products. Because of their close relationships with customers, salespeople are in the ideal position to connect the firm's NPD efforts to its customers. The extan...

In these turbulent economic times sales-marketing interfaces in business firms are in the state of flux. Sales-marketing interface researchers have till date characterized marketing within business firms in terms of a marketing department rather than a marketing function thereby ignoring B2B firms with no functional separation. This has limited our...

Purpose In B2B markets, the demand for a supplier's products is derived from demand further down the supply chain. This complexity poses several challenges for B2B firms, especially when they are located near the beginning of a supply chain. This study aims to investigate to what extent firms near the beginning of the supply chain are oriented towa...

This study examines the impact that downsizing of suppliers' sales and support personnel has on business customers' satisfaction. The study investigates what influence cultural differences may have on business customers' evaluations of satisfaction with and loyalty toward downsized suppliers. Survey data collected from 435 purchasing professionals...

The Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) was launched in 1984 and over its first two decades of existence evolved into the leading journal in the field of innovation and the management of technology. During these 20 years JPIM contributed to the field by publishing 488 academic papers. This paper is a follow-up study to an earlier study...

As the body of knowledge on marketing-sales interface expands, there is a greater need to investigate the specific aspects of marketing–sales configurations in B2B firms. Using a qualitative methodology and interview data collected from over 100 sales and marketing professionals from the US, The Netherlands and Slovenia, this study presents a dynam...

This study analyzes how and why a firm's change program to create a market-oriented innovation process depends on its environmental, innovational and organizational context. Based on an organizational-learning capabilities framework, the results from a multiple case study indicate how a firm's change objectives, activities and approach are affected...

The Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) serves as a marketplace for science-based, innovative ideas that are produced and consumed by scholars and businesspeople. Now that JPIM has existed for 20 years, two intriguing questions emerge: (1) How has the journal evolved over time in terms of knowledge stock, that is, what are the character...

Purpose This paper explores the marketing‐sales interface in Dutch and Slovenian B2B firms. Design/methodology/approach The study included 11 Dutch firms and ten Slovenian firms, with both samples as closely matched as possible. The firms were all manufacturers of physical products that operate internationally, but varied in terms of size and indu...

Firms increasingly realize that dramatically changing market conditions require significant changes in their purchasing function. In more and more firms, purchasing is becoming proactive and strategically important. This phenomenon has been called “reverse marketing.” As the term implies, there are clear similarities with the marketing concept. Thi...

Purpose Seeks to advocate adopting the comparative case study method and system dynamics modeling to inform theory and to prescribe executive actions for successfully managing new products built using radically new technologies. Design/methodology/approach Reviews NPD theory and research on the dynamic processes including feedback loops and the hi...

Purpose Seeks to introduce a JBIM special issue of articles that moves the innovation‐diffusion‐adoption (IDA) literature beyond identifying key success factors to thick descriptions of the dynamics of human interactions and the enactment of decisions‐events‐outcomes using multiple rounds of informant‐researcher interpretations. Design/methodology...

While there is an overwhelming amount of publications on cooperation in product development projects, they mainly focus on cooperation between business functions within an organization (internal cooperation) or on cooperation between organizations (external cooperation). Yet the relationship between internal and external cooperation has received on...

Research into new product development (NPD) has grown steadily over the last couple of decades. The current body of NPD research displays a distinct methodological bias and consists mostly of either large-scale quantitative questionnaires or small qualitative investigations that are often anecdotal. But a closer look at NPD practice reveals that NP...

Over time, the management literature has paid much attention to the topic of cooperation. The literature on cooperation can be divided into two broad parts, with one part focusing on cooperation within organizations (internal cooperation) and another addressing cooperation between organizations (external cooperation). Surprisingly, only little atte...

While there is quite some literature on the relationship between market orientation and product development, it is still unclear what market-oriented product development really is. In this article the authors present a conceptual framework detailing the elements of market-oriented product development and the relationships between these elements. Mo...

Purchasing is evolving into a strategic business activity and thus also a potential contributor to the successful development of new products. However, the literature on the involvement of purchasing in new product development (NPD) is sorely lacking. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate purchasing’s involvement in NPD, the drivers of t...

Purchasing is evolving into a strategic business activity and thus also a potential contributor to the successful development of new products. However, the literature on the involvement of purchasing in new product development (NPD) is sorely lacking. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate purchasing's involvement in NPD, the drivers of t...

Conceptualizing market orientation at the level of the product development process is relevant, because market orientation is a highly critical factor for new product success and this conceptualization can be used as a starting-point to transform the whole organization into a more market oriented one. Market-oriented product development appears to...

While the marketing literature treats consumer marketing and business marketing as two distinct marketing disciplines, many firms combine them by selling the same product both to consumers and business customers. This practice of dual marketing is quite common, but fraught with pitfalls and surprisingly neglected in the marketing literature. In thi...

In a recent issue of Industrial Marketing Management, Johnston, Leach, and Liu made a strong case for the use of case studies. Although they convincingly argued that researchers should follow a rigorous and systematic approach in conducting case studies, they failed to address the most important criticism of case studies, i.e., their alleged lack o...

Sweeping changes in the global marketplace have caused firms to restructure their organizations. In an increasing number of firms this has led to the development of a network organization. This article presents a brief survey of various disciplines that have come to use network concepts as part of their repertoire, such as sociology, economics, ind...

Discusses the concept of market-oriented product development and describes the extent to which a number of Danish food companies and Dutch manufacturers of medical equipment were market oriented in developing new products. The results are combined with the current product development literature to identify the major barriers that prevent managers f...

The development of innovations is increasingly portrayed as a dynamic interplay between two or more actors. This started with the seminal work of von Hippel concerning the role of users during the initial stages of the development cycle. Subsequent studies by numerous academics demonstrated the relevance of continuous interaction between the manufa...

Recent years have shown a proliferation of publications about interaction and networks. All in all, these articles and books tend to focus on the formulation of theory and hypotheses. Despite the relevance of further development of theoretical thought, managers display more interest in scientifically-based recommendations with direct practical rele...

Vita. Thesis (doctoral)--Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (p. 334-359).

A key characteristic of a market-oriented organization is harmonious interfaces between the various parts of the organization. One of these interfaces is the marketing-sales interface. While both marketing and sales are focused on serving customers and designed to play complementary roles, recent studies conclude that in practice marketing and sale...