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Professor Michel van der Borgh og Assoc. Prof. Selma Kadic-Maglajlic (CBS) udfolder “Holistic Selling”-paradigmet fra Journal of Marketing (2025) – om salgsrollen som orkestrator, der balancerer empati, data og relationer.
In this episode of Oplev Salg, we speak with Michel van der Borgh and Selma Kadic-Maglajlic, researchers at Copenhagen Business School, about holistic selling as a discipline in B2B markets.
The episode explores what holistic selling actually means, how it differs from traditional and relational selling approaches, and what it demands of sales professionals navigating complex buying journeys and multi-stakeholder ecosystems.
Rather than focusing narrowly on individual transactions, holistic selling means coordinating all the touchpoints a customer has with a company across the entire purchase process and beyond. The sales professional's role shifts toward ensuring that customers can make the best possible decisions with the right information at every stage.
A large share of interactions between buyers and sellers now happens digitally. Holistic selling requires integrating these digital touchpoints, including webinars, social channels, networks, and conferences, into a coherent experience rather than treating them as separate activities.
A key concept discussed is the idea that modern sales people are expected to act on behalf of their own organisation while also genuinely advocating for the success of the customer. This is not a contradiction but rather a more mature and collaborative model of selling, where long-term value creation takes priority over short-term persuasion.
Sales professionals must be able to move across their own organisation to secure internal resources, and equally across customer and partner organisations. Research highlights that the ability to navigate these networks, connect the right people, and integrate information from multiple sources is increasingly what separates effective sellers from the rest.
Beyond product knowledge and interpersonal skills, holistic selling demands capabilities such as understanding channel dynamics, collecting and integrating data, and demonstrating emotional intelligence. The image of the lone sales hero is giving way to a more collaborative and ecosystem-aware professional.
Holistic selling represents a meaningful shift in how B2B sales is understood and practiced. It asks sales professionals to think beyond individual deals and to take responsibility for the broader journey their customers are on. As buying behaviours grow more complex and digital interactions multiply, the ability to orchestrate rather than simply persuade becomes the defining capability of high-performing sales organisations.
Holistic selling is a concept which assumes certain changes compared to some previous concepts that we have in sales theory but also in sales practice. Nowadays, we are moving from closing deals to orchestrating touchpoints. In holistic selling we assume that customers are in contact with a company through different touchpoints, and this contact has to be orchestrated from pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase phase.
You can also question what is really the role of the salesperson in orchestrating these touchpoints. The salesperson has to make sure that the customer has enough information, knowledge, skills, and abilities to make better decisions. So it is the role and responsibility of the salesperson to boost the customer to make more informed, better decisions.
What I really like in the concept of holistic selling is the idea that the customer journey is not something which is owned by the salesperson. The purchase journey is owned by the customer, and the salesperson is there as a kind of support and orchestrator in the journey.
If you want a parallel with our everyday life, you can think about the process of how we drive a car. In this context, the customer is the driver who owns his or her car. But then there is also a GPS system which helps and which definitely has an important role in making sure that we don't end up in a dead end in some unfamiliar city where we are for the first time. Salespeople are the GPS in a customer journey owned by the customer.
As a practice, I think it's already out there for a long time, and salespeople are already doing it to some extent. But what we see is that people talk about it in different ways. Often when we talk about professional selling, it's about order taking, making sure that you get the customer, that you make the deal, that they become a customer. And then after that you can do some relational selling, which is really about managing the account, keeping them in, making sure that it is a profitable account.
More recently, we also have this concept called digital selling, which is really extending the sales environment and the sales activities by incorporating digital means. What we see is that holistic selling takes all of that into account, but also adds something to it. It is really about the orchestration, to make sure that you boost the customer's decision-making process so that they are able to make the most informed decision possible. And that really goes beyond things like nudging customers, because that would be more about trying to influence them and guide them in a certain direction. Here, it is really about acting as a partner on the same level and making that informed decision.
What I also want to make sure we are aware of is that digital selling is not something we believe is going to end its life. Based on Gartner research, around 80% of interactions between salespeople and customers are digital interactions. So digital selling has evolved into holistic selling. Salespeople practicing holistic selling will be aware of all these touchpoints, and they will be the ones to orchestrate those interactions, meaning orchestrating webinars, case studies, white papers, and different networking conferences with purchasing apps and different sites, to make sure that the customer has information when the customer needs and wants it.
Holistic selling does not assume that the salesperson has answers to all possible questions. But holistic selling assumes that many people and many touchpoints are working in the background to serve and collaborate with the customer, while the salesperson is a kind of spider in a web who knows where to go for answers when those answers are needed by the customer.
The orchestration element is really the focus of holistic selling. It is really about the salesperson acting as an orchestrator in this web or network or ecosystem. There are several elements to this.
The first one is that the salesperson is not only acting on behalf of the supplier organization to make sure that they become profitable, but they also have an interest in making sure that the customer succeeds. There is new research on customer success management really tapping into that, and holistic selling labels this in a new term called dual agency. The salesperson is not only an agent of the company, but also an agent of the customer. And beyond that, it is actually even more than dual agency. It is more of a multi-agency phenomenon, where you see that there are so many stakeholders involved, not only one organization supplying and one organization buying, but within those organizations you have multiple stakeholders. And especially in complex sales, other actors like governments, municipalities, or partner organizations are all involved in that process, and the main goal of the salesperson is to orchestrate that.
The second element is this networking ability, to make sure that you have an overview of the network and that you involve all the actors. The third element is to make sure that you connect all the dots along the customer journey throughout the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase phases. And finally, what is essential is that the salesperson ensures that for all players involved, but specifically for the customer, it is a seamless and hassle-free experience, and that the customer is making the most informed decision possible.
This also means moving beyond traditional methods such as SPIN selling, because customers are now very much aware of their needs and power has moved from salespeople to customers. Customers are the ones able to make decisions and to look for support from salespeople when they need that support.
On the first sight it could sound like a contradiction, but it is not really. Because for many, many years we have been very much aware of win-win negotiations. For many years we have been aware that it is not about splitting the pie, but rather making the pie bigger. And now this has a new label in holistic selling.
What I really like is a quote from one VP who said: "We think about salespeople as our lawyers in the buyer's company, where they are the ones to advocate for our needs, to promote us, and to make sure that we get the best when we need a certain product, service, or collaboration." So making sure that there is awareness of the win-win argument is key in the role of salespeople, and then it is not really a contradiction but rather thinking about ourselves as someone who is there for the vendor but also for the buyer.
What we see is that this much resembles what we already see at an organizational level, where companies increasingly talk about managing their ecosystems and moving away from linear supply chain thinking. And now we also see that happening on the individual salesperson level. Within these ecosystems, the ecosystem thrives because all of the individual actors thrive, and that is also the purpose of the salesperson at the buyer journey level.
It is very important for the salesperson to connect all the elements, and that implies that you need to be informed. You need to be skillful, or at least have knowledge about digital channels, how to collect data, and how to integrate that data. But you also need the abilities to talk with people, to reach out to the right people, and to have this navigating ability.
There are studies conducted 10 to 15 years ago that already tapped into the navigation abilities and capabilities of salespeople, and those studies showed that the people who are able to navigate organizations, not only within their own organization but also outside of it, are the most successful.
When I think about salespeople, I sometimes think about certain heroes who have characteristics that assemble superheroes. What we really expect from salespeople nowadays is that they are able to put themselves in the shoes of customers but also in the shoes of vendors, and to understand both sides and think about the benefits for both. So that means being very empathetic and having a high level of emotional intelligence.
For many years, we have also known that salespeople have to be smart and to demonstrate cognitive intelligence, to think, reflect, and critically analyze. However, today that is not enough, because we are faced with technological developments and holistic selling is very much based on touchpoints where at least 80% are digital. We really need salespeople who are technologically and digitally savvy, who are able to understand data and analytics. I would also add that they need to understand, not necessarily coding, but at least how outputs of AI are being created, because that kind of knowledge will equip salespeople to be very critical in regards to different AI-based tools that we have today. To cut a long story short, we need smart, empathetic, and digitally savvy salespeople.
They also need to be more entrepreneurial, within their company and outside of it, really being action-oriented. They need to be able to manage their networks, to have an overview of the ecosystem, and to understand what is important and what is not. At CBS, we have a Master of Science in Sales Management where we train our students in exactly these things, equipping them in professional selling but also giving them an understanding of ecosystems, digital platforms, analytics, and entrepreneurship.
What you see is that companies increasingly need to understand that the type of people they are going to recruit are not only people-oriented or able to negotiate and have the core sales competencies. They also need to be skilled in analytical areas and have a more strategic overview of what it implies to actually manage organizations, make deals, involve people, persuade them, and make them more successful. This is also why we at CBS say that being trained in sales management is your inroads to more leadership positions within an organization, because you need the same competencies that a leader also needs.
Of course there are blind spots. Based on talking with many companies and many professionals, overthinking is always a blind spot, because orchestration and holistic selling cannot become too bureaucratized. We cannot have too much admin and bureaucracy around it, because customers will really lose patience. Customers appreciate having things at the time when they need them and appreciate relatively quick feedback.
Context also really matters. One size does not fit all, so orchestration would not be the best strategy and holistic selling would not be the best strategy if you are selling something like print ink or a relatively simple product. Holistic selling really corresponds to a B2B context where we are talking about very complex products, long sales cycles, and enterprises collaborating together with many touchpoints between them. If we are focusing on simple and short sales cycles, a different sales approach would be more appropriate.
From an academic perspective, what we could do is develop tools around the concept of holistic selling. That implies developing tools together with practitioners and companies in the field to explain but also to execute holistic selling. Because we are talking about an ecosystem perspective, we need to make sure that people go beyond linear thinking and adopt a more systems thinking approach where complex relationships are involved. Developing tools that help and enable people to do that is very important, and then we can test whether that actually has impact.
Next to that, we also need different metrics. When is holistic selling successful and when is it not? It is not only about closing the deal, but about win-win-win situations and boosting the buying process of the customer. That implies asking how we are going to measure and operationalize this boosting, and I think there we do not have all the answers yet.
We also have to be very careful, because we know from research that having many types of performance measures tied to quarterly results or incentives for salespeople is hurting their well-being and causing stress, potentially creating uncertainty around the job and causing increases in neuroticism and other negative effects. So it is our role as academics to develop valid and reliable ways to measure holistic selling. But then there is also a responsibility for managers to find which of these measures fits best to their context and to avoid introducing a measure that could be a double-edged sword, helping on one side but causing harm on the other. One size fits all really does not work.
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