Centre for Business Markets at ISB is pleased to announce the second seminar on  'Cross-Selling B2B Services' in the series of Knowledge Creation Seminars. This seminar aims to create new knowledge in the marketing and sales domain. During the session, an academic expert will make a presentation of their current work for 20 minutes. Following the presentation, the researcher and 1-2 executives who are experts in that area will provide their insights and the relevance of the presented research for practice. A Q&A with the participants will follow the session. The goal of the Knowledge creation seminar is to provide a platform that allows for easy exchange of ideas and better collaboration between academicians and practitioners.

The seminar on Cross-selling B2B Services is based on the research conducted by Professor Vamsi Kanuri, University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business and his co-authors. Business-to-business (B2B) suppliers are increasingly cross-selling additional services along with the core service to improve profitability, yet the effects of cross-selling on individual buyer relationships across multiple service adoption stages remain unclear. Using a multimethod approach, this research sheds light on the dynamic impacts of cross-selling on buyer retention in the onboarding and post-onboarding service adoption stages. A field study involving a leading B2B software-as-a-service provider reveals that cross-selling a higher number of services can significantly decrease buyer retention in the onboarding stage, but increase it in the post-onboarding stage. Moreover, moving to leaner communication channels during the onboarding stage—a common B2B cost-saving tactic—can aggravate attrition but enhance retention in the post-onboarding stage. A survey of B2B managers from various industries confirms that their perceptions of the complexity associated with deploying additional services and switching costs, as mediating mechanisms, determine the effectiveness of cross-selling in onboarding and post-onboarding stages, respectively. For practitioners, a simulation also reveals the economic significance of dynamically decomposing the effects of cross-selling across service adoption stages.