Portfolio of supplier-customer relationships

The main body of research on industrial marketing over the last 20 years has concentrated on giving a relational framework to an activity which had previously been understood to be essentially transactional. Therefore, the management of business relationships is today considered as a critical task on which a company's very existence depends. Consequently, allotting limited company resources between several relationships has become a major task for marketers who must decide how to divide and allot time and money for customers and prospective customers. In this renewed context, the portfolio concept for supplier-customer relationships are of a continuous nature and when the boundaries of the customer are easy to delimit. In order to widen the scope of their relevance, we propose to re-embed the supplier-customer relationship into the network of business actors that influences it and to be very careful in defining who is the customer.