Why customers hate salespeople - a study of business-to-business sales relationships

Acquiring business-to-business customers through trusting and mutually beneficial relationships creates competitive advantage for companies (Newell et al., 2011) and particularly for their sales organization (Djurica et al., 2011). While sales teams in all sectors agree that improving customer retention is imperative, customers still encounter unsatisfactory service resulting in their defection. Despite this fact, very few qualitative studies have examined customers’ experiences of poor service resulting in weakened relationships or ultimately terminating the salesperson-customer relationship. This paper adds to academia knowledge and industry practice by identifying critical incident factors that led to ‘why customers hate salespeople’.