Proposing business-to-business customer value: towards a conceptualisation of the value proposing actor

This paper offers an alternative conceptualisation to the prevailing notions of salesperson available in dominant conceptualisations of the term. From the conceptualisations of professional sales and key account managers, we identify eleven themes which denote something different to prevailing notions of selling and tentatively propose the notion of a value proposing actor. The value proposing actor is suggested to be a practitioner capable of seeing the buyer-seller action in context and is sensitive to the sociological aspects of the interaction, such as a process of establishing their eligibility and credibility. We propose that the value creating actor fits in a conceptual position missed in the notions of value co-creation available in the service dominant logic literature, which tends to conflate the individual value proposing actor with the value product of the dyadic exchange.