Marketing relationships have evolved from simple dyadic transactions between the firm and its customers into scenarios in which the firm's frontline employees are required to manage a portfolio of stakeholder relationships. The authors begin by characterizing the “strategic” frontline employee (SFLE) as a focal marketing employee who, in the execution of his or her work, must influence a variety of stakeholder target groups, including (1) customers, (2) the internal business team, and (3) external business partners. The authors leverage data from SFLEs at two firms to explore the similarities and differences in SFLE influence tactic effectiveness across the three stakeholder groups. They find that the effectiveness of influence tactics in driving performance differs across stakeholder target types and, somewhat surprisingly, that the SFLE's influence of both the internal business team and external business partners has a greater effect on his or her performance than does influence directed at customers. The authors close with a discussion of the implications for theory and practice.

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The availability of information and variety of online purchase options are increasing for consumers shopping for complex products (e.g., cars, real estate). This situation, and consumers' resulting sense of informedness, has led many to suggest that the need for business-to-consumer (B2C) salespeople is diminishing. Yet, despite these claims, many purchases-especially those associated with high prices and, therefore, high consumer involvement-still require consumers to interact with salespeople. This interaction, between consumers (at varying levels of informedness) and B2C salespeople, is the focus of the current study. Merging theories of consumer informedness and adaptive interpersonal influence, we suggest that the interaction between salesperson influence attempts and consumer informedness plays an important role in purchase decisions. To study this notion, Study 1 matches automobile shoppers' survey responses with objective purchase data from 480 sales interactions. Study 2 is a scenario-based experiment that investigates informedness and influence in a financial services setting. The findings of both studies suggest that understanding a consumer's informedness, and adapting the proper influence approach to it, is critical if salespeople are to influence modern consumers' purchase decisions and, thus, avoid irrelevancy.

Personal stress is a prevalent problem in a connected world. For salespeople, demands of a connected workplace have largely eliminated boundaries between personal and work life, allowing stress from personal issues to spill over into their work. Thus, problems of health, relationships, and finances are no longer "left at home" for salespeople. Rather, a less central workplace model (e.g., remote workplaces and mobile platforms) and 24/7 work expectations expand the workplace, which comingles personal and work demands. Utilizing a sample of 331 salespeople, we study personal stressors that cross boundaries into the workplace and find that they play a critical role in the formation of burnout across its dimensions, which leads to reduced salesperson performance. Our research contributes to the sales literature by investigating individual personal stressors via Job Demands and Conservation of Resources theories and offers insights for managers of salespeople that face both personal and work stress.

This editorial addresses the age-old service problem, where B2B customers fail to realize value and become dissatisfied, which leads to churn and reduced profitability of the vendor firm. Specifically, we focus on how proactively servicing customers can reduce churn rates by ensuring that customers realize promised, recurring, and sufficient value. The issue of churn is becoming increasingly critical as firms transition to digital-and subscription-based service offerings, which greatly reduces switching costs. In these models, which depend on recurring revenue, reports from industry demonstrate that traditional customer service and support efforts are not sufficient in retaining customers.A primary driver of churn from increased service efforts is the inability of firms to proactively engage with customers to cocreate value. To overcome this problem, customer success management, which we operationally define as "the proactive (versus reactive) relational engagement of customers to ensure the value potential of product offerings is realized by the customer," is becoming a common industry practice. Customer success management is needed because within dynamic relationships (Zhang et al. 2016), customers that aren't properly engaged (i.e., helped in maintaining value as offerings expand and change) can feel neglected and betrayed, which drives migration toward negative relationship states. Given its focus on retaining customers, this new form of B2B relationship management is quickly being adopted across firms that offer full-service solutions, yet the topic is largely absent from the literature. Thus, our editorial is intended to spur new research on customer success management and proactive customer engagement. In the remainder of this editorial, we first review relevant literature that provides a foundation for customer success (CS). We then describe the customer success manager (CSM) role, followed by an agenda for future research that provides an initial starting point for investigation by service scholars. Finally, we close with a mini case study from GE Digital to showcase the potential impact of CS programs within service firms. Basis of the Customer Success Role in Scholarly ResearchThe notion of CS builds upon seminal concepts of services marketing. For example, while not using the CS term, Berry (1995) suggests service providers should take good care of customers via relationship marketing initiatives. Thus, we suggest that the role of CSM is an evolution of the trend toward service-sales interfaces and adoption of ambidextrous approaches to managing dynamic relationships. Dynamic customer relationships have been shown to migrate in both positive and negative directions, leading to better or worse relationship states (Zhang et al. 2016). Migration can occur from firm and frontline efforts that are (un)satisfactory to address increased market, customer, and product needs. The concept of service-sales ambidexterity, where service workers are asked to sell and salespeople offer service, is one way that firms ...