Today organizations realize that in order to be successful, they need to rethink the way they do their business. One of the organizational areas that many companies have not utilized in an optimal way are sales. The image of an independent salesperson calling, mailing or going around and visiting customers can be expected to decline in the nearest future. The profession of sales work and the emergence of new sales efforts are changing so rapidly today that it can simply determine who will succeed and who will fail in the following years. Some of the leading reasons for such a situation are a growing complexity of organizational offerings, a changing mixture of customer base, and a constant redefinition of ideas for growing successful business. The fact that these days organizations have access to technological achievements that our forefathers could only dream of brings up the importance of such a sales debate into the headlines.

Drawing on such notions there is a need to answer some questions: How do organizations work today with sales? Why is it so important for organizations to rethink their sales work? What kinds of problems do they meet? How do they solve their problems in sales? How should the future sales look like? How can modern technological achievements contribute to future sales success?

Dariusz Osowski is a PhD student at the Department of Business Studies and addresses these and similar questions in his research work. His earlier working background in the area of marketing, sales, project management and engineering aids him in challenging these problems. He sees his experience as a sales manager and engineer with interest on novel technological solutions as helpful in his pursuit of redefining better and wiser sales. In his research, he involves himself in the practice-turn debate in general and focuses on the work practices in particular. He believes that answering the question of how organizations conduct their work today can set a new light on our conception of sales practices. To achieve this goal, he utilizes in his research the concepts of organizational routines, work boundaries, communities, emotions, and information technology.

Publikationer

Doctoral Thesis

• Osowski, D. (2013) From Illusiveness to Genuineness: Routines, Trading Zones, Tools and Emotions in Sales Work, Doctoral thesis / Företagsekonomiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet. ISSN: 1103-8454, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University.