Operational and Work System-Related Success Factors for Customer Relationship Management in "Product Sales" and "Solution Sales" - a Descriptive Case Study

Despite much IS research on customer relationship management (CRM) and respective (critical) success factors (SFs), CRM initiatives are still subject to high failure rates. One reason may be that many studies rather exclusively deal with a technological and project perspective and thus focus on CRM-related IT systems and their introduction. As a consequence, no holistic perspective on CRM in the sense of an integrated and IT-reliant work system is taken on. In addition, existing SFs are rather abstract and barely useful for practitioners. Thus, there is a research need for SFs that are concrete – which will be referred to as operational – and beyond IT. In order to attain preliminary knowledge, we conducted a descriptive single-case study within the German sales department of a global company from the electronics and electrical engineering industry. In the course of a two-stage data collection and analysis process, 56 sales managers of the two sales types “product sales” and “solution sales” were interviewed as regards organizational setting, sales process, and information requirements. As contribution, we propose rankings of operational and work system-related SFs, additional qualitative information, and differences between “product sales” and “solution sales”.