Fostering collaborative mind-sets among customers: a transformative learning approach

To succeed and grow, companies must win new customers. However, selling innovative solutions to prospective business customers remains challenging. We seek to explore how salespeople create, early in the sales process, collaborative customer mind-sets to accommodate learning and adoption of new solutions. By applying transformative learning theory and analyzing authentic video-recorded business-to-business (B2B) initial sales meetings, we are able to determine the microlevel processes and mechanisms taking place in transformative sales dialogue. In this article, we outline seven interactional activities occurring in reflective dialogue cycles, a key means by which salespeople create new customer mind-sets. Reflective dialogue cycles form a spiral-shaped process requiring completion to achieve a shared new understanding favorable to adopting new approaches. Through our analysis, we demonstrate the value of transformative learning theory in better understanding sales interactions. Along with theoretical contributions, our results may help managers and salespeople better develop new business customers.