Financial administration field is going through major changes. Rapid and constant change in the field such as the changing role of accountant, growing digitalization and trend of outsourcing. Especially, the ever-growing competition brings challenges for accounting firms.
As a result, accounting firms have changed their organizational structure to response more to customer needs. They have built own sales organization to keep up the competition which has not traditionally been part of the financial administration field.
Customers’ value creation and sales
The purpose of my master’s thesis was to find ways to develop case company’s sales management. More precisely, to study how customer’s value creation contributes to the development of sales management and what kind of values customer’s value creation produces for sales management at the beginning of customer relationship.
The case company comes from the financial administration field which is going through changes. The digitalisation has rapidly increased over the years and will definitely increase all the time and moreover, customer preferences have changed.
Sales organizations in financial administration
So why did I choose this topic? I have a professional experience from the financial administration field and during my master’s studies I studied sales management as my minor studies. It was easy and natural combine these two topics as a research.
I also saw the opportunity for interesting research because as mentioned previously separate sales organization has not traditionally been part of the financial administration field.
Furthermore, it can be seen that when a new customer is reached, there is many value creation points to be managed.
Ideas for developing sales management
The research results showed that value creation process happens if there is interaction between customer and service provider. Especially, the value creation process highlighted the roles of customer, service provider and interactions.
Customer’s value creation produced new values to sales management parts which are sales strategy, sales operations and sales analysis. These values can be used together with existed values which help the development of sales management.
Overall, the practical contribution of my master’s thesis was achieved which was to understand how sales management can be developed.
Jenna Nuutinen
Master’s Thesis Title: Value Creation in Sales Management: Case from Financial Administration Field
Supervisor: Eeva Aromaa